


The Hound and the Maiden

by tptplayer5701



Series: "Mind Games"-verse [32]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dog Miraculous, Enemies to Friends, Family, Friendship, Miraculous Holder Amélie Graham de Vanily, Miraculous Holder Félix Graham de Vanily, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Peacock Miraculous, Post-Hawk Moth Defeat, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27262468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tptplayer5701/pseuds/tptplayer5701
Summary: A "Mind Games"-verse story:“You’ve got some nerve, Dog Boy,” Iron Maiden growled, glaring at him under her helmet.“I’ve got some nerve?” the Hound scoffed, giving his leash a casual twirl before securing it on his belt. “You’re the one causing all the property damage here, not me!”“All of this?” she demanded, throwing her arms out to encompass the scene. “None of this was my fault! That was all Mecha-Man!”“What about the crate you shot?” he retorted, pointing at it, his eyes not leaving her helmet. “Are you telling me Mecha-Man made you shoot that?”“No,” she replied. She advanced on him and poked him in the chest. “You did! If I never see you again, it will be too soon.”“Fine,” he replied. “Just let the real hero take care of this kind of trouble next time.”"Jackass."
Relationships: Amélie Graham de Vanily & Duusu, Amélie Graham de Vanily & Félix Graham de Vanily, Bridgette & Félix Graham de Vanily, Emilie Agreste & Amélie Graham de Vanily, Félix Graham de Vanily & Barkk, Félix Graham de Vanily & Emilie Agreste
Series: "Mind Games"-verse [32]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1666807
Comments: 44
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There were a few questions about whether Felix should have received the Dog Miraculous at the end of [“A Miraculous Adventure in Tibet.”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26542858/chapters/65207875) Hopefully this story will answer those questions! This does come after “The Woman out of the Fridge” [chapter 12](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26747443/chapters/66506734), in which Emilie gave the Peacock Miraculous to Amelie to hold temporarily.

According to Barkk, the Hound was a war hero. While his partner the Fox hid in the shadows and drove the Luftwaffe to distraction through misdirection, creating illusory targets for them to attack while hiding actual targets from their view, the Hound stood tall and rallied the people of London with his Doggedness to weather the bombings, rescuing those trapped and using his flight power-up to join the aerial battle on occasion. On D-Day, while the Fox kept up the illusion of greater Allied numbers, the Hound led the British attack on Sword Beach, nearly losing his life to a German counterattack before almost singlehandedly repulsing a column of German Panzers. At the Battle of the Bulge, the Hound rallied the Allied troops over and over to slow the German advance and buy time for reinforcements to arrive. At the war’s end, he had received a knighthood from the King himself for his service before hanging up the collar to return to a quiet life.

According to Felix, he really didn’t give a rat’s ass if Barkk’s last holder was a decorated war hero. _This_ Hound was most definitely _not_ looking to get blown away by a machine gun or run over by a tank, and he certainly had no intention of leading a squadron of Spitfires into battle! Sure, the Heroes of Paris had to deal with Miraculous-wielding psychopaths and men in metal suits on a regular basis, but after his one experience this summer with an extraordinary adversary – one which literally ate Kwamis for breakfast – Felix knew that kind of thing just wasn’t for him. At the moment, he much preferred to make his patrols of London and fight his own brand of villains in his own way.

Of course, the villain he was after at the moment was not exactly making that easy.

The first body had been discovered last winter: a woman who had just finished her shift at an East End club, found with her throat slit. The second body hadn’t been found until a couple months after the first, this one near a club south of the Thames, and she had been raped before her death. By the time the third body had been found, this time with her abdomen cut open postmortem, the police had connected the murders and the media had decided they had to be the work of a serial killer. Then the Times received a letter from the self-styled “Stripper Ripper,” beginning a months-long game of cat-and-mouse between Scotland Yard, the City of London Police, and the Ripper.

Last spring, when the Ripper had first made headlines, Felix had begun to follow the developments in the media along with the rest of London, though not as regularly as some of his housemates at Eton had. An ex-girlfriend with whom he’d had a brief fling the summer after his father died had lived in the same neighborhood as the Ripper’s fourth victim, which had piqued his curiosity. He didn’t particularly like the idea of a serial killer on the loose in London, any more than anyone else in the country did, but the threat had seemed so distant before he received his miraculous over the summer.

But of course that had all changed after Tibet.

On one of his first outings with the Dog Miraculous, while he was still trying to find his bearings, he had been running across the rooftops of London to test his speed when he had heard a piercing scream from an alleyway. He reached the scene just in time to watch someone disappear around the corner. On a cursory glance he hadn’t seen anything in the alleyway, so he had assumed it was just a cat that had been startled. The next morning when he came down for lunch, his mother had been reading about another Ripper murder – in the very alley where he’d heard the scream. That was when Felix had started patrolling more regularly in London. After all, perhaps what this cat-and-mouse game was missing was a Hound.

Unfortunately, that was also when the Ripper had started leaving chew toys in his victims’ hands.

The Hound ground his teeth in frustration. He really hadn’t set out to confront or stop a serial killer – that just wasn’t his style! But the Stripper Ripper was calling him out now! He couldn’t just ignore such an obvious challenge, even if no one in the press had connected the chew toys to the Hound yet.

That was how he found himself racing around London in the middle of the night, making concentric circles with the senti-bloodhound that La Paonne Deux had created to assist him for the night. “Has that thing found anything yet?” he asked, jumping across an alleyway and rolling to his feet on the apartment building roof on the other side.

“Nothing yet,” replied La Paonne Deux over their communicators. He could almost hear her sipping tea in the back sitting room they had set aside weeks ago for hero business. “Please be careful if you do find this man, will you?”

The Hound rolled his eyes. “Of course, Mother.” One of his floppy miraculous ears stood straight up at the sound of glass breaking. He stopped immediately and closed his eyes, ignoring all the other late-night city sounds and instead focusing on this specific one. There was a moment of silence, followed by the clink of a piece of glass hitting the pavement. He frowned. It sounded like it was coming from a residential neighborhood just outside the city center, well away from any of the Stripper Ripper’s usual hunting grounds. He could look into it, but it could only be a distraction from his objective. With a sigh he took off again, running across the rooftops of London.

He had almost completed his third full circuit of the city when another sound caught his attention. He cocked his head, skidding to a halt on the edge of the roof. Somewhere nearby he had heard a faint gasping sound, followed by a grunt and a whimper. _Jackpot._ “I think I’ve got something. Send the dog my way.” He turned in the direction of the noise and raced three streets over before dropping into the alleyway where he could hear the sounds of a weak struggle deep in the shadows. “Gods, and I thought the last place _I_ took a date was filthy,” the Hound commented, affecting a casual posture as his eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. A nondescript man with sandy hair crouched on the ground and held a knife to a woman’s throat. The woman lay on her back against the wall of a building, her blouse in shreds and her miniskirt hiked up, one shoe missing, a look of terror and pain in her eyes. Shallow cuts covering her arms, chest, and shoulders wept blood. “I sure hope you at least took her to _dinner_ first.”

The sound of typing came through the communicator in his ear. “I just sent your location to the nearest BCU,” his mother informed him. “I will let you know when I receive a response.”

The man jumped to his feet and whipped around to face the Hound, his knife held in front of his chest defensively. He placed one foot on the woman’s throat, eliciting a moan of pain from her. “Think you’re the one to stop me, Puppers?” he taunted.

The Hound ignored the question. “So what’s your thing, huh? Power? Ritual? Oh, did you sell your soul to _Santa_ instead of _Satan_?” The Hound looked the man down, raised an eyebrow, and snorted. “ _That_ ’s what you’re working with? I guess there’s no need to look for _other_ motives: it’s no wonder you can’t get a woman…”

The Ripper glared at him while fumbling with his zipper with his free hand. “I can get any woman I want!”

“Yeah, and all you have to do is stick a knife in her face.” The Hound smirked. “I see why you keep leaving giant bones at the crime scenes: compensating much?”

“If you’re not careful, I may branch out into animal cruelty next…” The Ripper eyed him ominously, tightening his grip on the knife handle.

“And if _you’re_ not careful, _I_ may test to see if I really _can_ launch you all the way from here to the Thames!”

The Ripper growled, but not before the Hound detected the hint of fear in his eyes.

The Hound sighed and shook his head in disappointment. Considering all the effort he’d put into this manhunt up to now, he’d been hoping for something a little more… _more_. Instead, the Ripper turned out to be a poorly-dressed guy who thought a penknife was an actual weapon against a superhero. Still, as long as he was caught, nothing wrong with toying with the mouse… “Hey, man, you do you,” he finally told him with a shrug. “Normally I’m not one for interrupting another man when he’s busy. It’s just… if you keep on murdering all the hot ones, there won’t be any left for the rest of us. And you called me out. So…”

In the blink of an eye the Hound flicked his leash out and looped it around the Ripper’s arm, moments before he heard a hound’s bay from the roof above him and the midnight-blue senti-hound leapt for the Ripper’s head. It snarled and sunk its claws into his chest and shoulders just before its teeth found his throat. The Ripper’s eyes shot wide open as the hound’s weight drove him backward against the brick wall behind him. He managed to get a hand on the senti-hound’s chest and push it off of himself before it could latch on, slashing at its flank with his knife. The knife bounced off the hard Amokized hide, and the senti-hound contorted in midair to land on its feet between the Ripper and his victim, a low-pitched bay escaping its throat, eyes narrowed to tiny slits at it focused in on its quarry. Seeing the Ripper’s distraction, the Hound yanked on his leash, pulling the man away from the wall to the side, further from his victim. He stumbled off-balance and fell to his knees with a cry of alarm. The Hound gave the leach a flick, flinging the man into the air screaming, spun, and slammed him face-first into the brick wall of the nightclub to one side of the alley. Glancing down at the woman he’d rescued, his eyes trailed down the cuts on her chest to the sheer bra that the Ripper had pushed askew. “I’d suggest you get out of here,” he told her, his eyes returning to her face as he reached down to grab her forearm and help her up, placing one hand on her back to steady her.

The woman nodded and wobbled in the direction of the street, trying to straighten her clothing as best she could.

The Hound’s enhanced hearing picked up two noises at the same moment from opposite directions. In one direction he heard the siren of a police car heading toward them, on the same side of the street that the victim had gone. In the other direction he heard the sound of a police-band radio.

“We have a 10-43 in progress at the Lloyd’s Bank of London.”

“Dammit,” the Hound muttered. He glanced down at the Ripper, who had regained his senses and was glaring up at him furiously. The victim hadn’t quite made it to the street, and the police car sounded like it was still several blocks away – if it was coming to investigate them at all. But still… He flicked his wrist, throwing the Ripper five meters into the air, and released him from the end of the leash in midair. The man yelled in terror, his arms windmilling in a desperate attempt to catch hold of the fire escape ladder just out of his reach.

“Felix,” his mother warned. “What are you thinking?”

But the Hound didn’t stay to watch the rapist land, or respond to his mother’s question; instead, he took to the rooftops in the direction of the bank.


	2. Chapter 2

Iron Maiden sprang backward through the air, sailed over the parked car she’d been standing in front of, landed behind the car’s boot, and dropped down to one knee. A spray of plasma scored a line in the pavement right where she had been standing moments before. The street in front of the Lloyd’s Bank of London had turned into a warzone in the blink of an eye, deep gouges in the road surface from heavy metal boots and the repeated discharges of energy cannons, the scene illuminated by the flickering lights put off by small fires. On the opposite side of the car from where Iron Maiden sheltered stood Mecha-Man – though not exactly. She furrowed her brows inside the helmet, consulting the slightly-blurred images her helmet camera had caught when he first stepped out of the bank. His armor looked nothing like the previous iteration. Where the old armor had been sleek and aerodynamic, this new armor was bulky and angular. In lieu of the miniature internal hydraulics, it now sported smaller external pistons, similar to those on the original variant though not as obvious. The smooth silver helmet stood out in stark contrast to the multicolored plates covering the rest of the suit, some of which showed signs of repaired dents. A couple had even begun to rust through.

“What happened to _you_?” she taunted, her voice coming out mechanical thanks to the voice scrambler built into her helmet. “Did someone leave you out in the rain? Did you forget about the London fog?”

“I will leave _you_ out in the rain!” Mecha-Man retorted. He spun around to face her and let loose another stream of energy at the car where she had taken cover. A pair of smoke grenades deployed from compartments on the front of his chest. The grenades hit the ground and rolled in opposite directions, spinning around and releasing twin plumes of grey smoke into the air. The smoke, combined with the multiple fires started along both sides of the street by Mecha-Man’s energy blasts, gave the scene a surreal quality. Despite her airtight helmet, Iron Maiden could still smell the acrid stench of burning asphalt and plastic seeping through the suit’s joints. The heat coming from a trash bin fire on the sidewalk behind her worked its way through her metal suit and caused sweat to begin running down her back.

“You know, WD-40 will clear that up nicely. In fact, if you come with me, I might have a little lying around!” She shifted positions to the opposite side of the car as Mecha-Man turned to the sound of her voice. With him turned away from her, she raised her helmet slightly to peek over the back of the car, switching her view to infrared to eliminate the distraction of the smoke still billowing from the grenades. Although the image was still confused and disjointed, she could clearly see a pair of men dragging a large crate out of the bank behind Mecha-Man. Then Mecha-Man noticed her, turned, and raised his arm cannon to aim it over the car directly at Iron Maiden’s head. With a split-second to spare she ducked and rolled out from behind the car moments before he fired on her previous location, missing her and striking the building behind her, throwing up a cloud of brick shards that fell around her and dinged off her suit with a noise like hail. She came up in a crouch, steadying her right arm with her left and aimed her own arm cannon straight at his chest. “Second option: just melt it off!” She took careful aim down her arm and fired. The white plasma missed him by a handbreadth, instead striking the panel truck behind him and scoring a circular patch of paint off of its side.

Mecha-Man moved to his right to plant himself between Iron Maiden and the truck, and Iron Maiden saw her opening. She took careful aim and shot her grappling hook at the exposed crate being carried by Mecha-Man’s cronies. At the same moment, a dog leash shot out from the opposite direction. Her grappling hook struck the leash and caught it through the collar.

“Dammit!” she shouted, hitting the control to retract the grappling hook, dragging the leash with it, and rising to her feet. At the same moment she stepped forward and took a blind shot with the grappling hook on her other arm, catching one of the men carrying the crate around the leg. She reversed the cord winch and jerked her arm back, pulling the man off-balance. He fell to the ground with a cry of alarm, letting go of the crate as he did so. One side of the crate fell to the ground, and Iron Maiden shot it with her arm cannon, melting a hole through the side of the crate. The crate broke in half and sent its contents cascading out onto the street as the other goon dropped his half of the damaged crate.

Mecha-Man stomped his foot in frustration. “No!” He bounded toward her and leapt into the air, bringing his fist up.

Iron Maiden dove forward and raised her arm in a block, catching his fist and deflecting it away from her face. She drove her opposite fist into his exposed chest with a metallic clang, knocking him stumbling backward. The same dog leash appeared from her right and tangled around Mecha-Man’s legs, and he threw out his arms for balance before falling flat onto his back. A figure in a brown leather bodysuit with a lighter brown belt, silver-tipped boots, and floppy brown ears drooping down from the top of his head to cover his human ears leapt out of nowhere, aiming to land on top of Mecha-Man. Mecha-Man pulled back his arm cannon and shot the hero square in the chest. The hero retracted his leash and spun it as a shield below himself as he fell, blocking the energy beam and redirecting it down into the pavement next to Mecha-Man’s chest, centimeters from Iron Maiden’s own boot. She jumped back and glared at the newcomer in annoyance. Mecha-Man pushed himself up and slammed his fist into the hero’s leash-shield as he landed. The leash wrapped around Mecha-Man’s forearm, and the hero tugged and stepped on his leash, directing that arm down to point at the ground.

“A mecha-strike fight in the middle of London, and you didn’t invite me,” the new hero mocked, clucking his tongue in disapproval. “I’ll have you know I was the reigning house champion for the last three years in tournament!”

“Are you seriously comparing this to that stupid _video game_?” Iron Maiden demanded, staring at him in disbelief.

The hero hummed. “I suppose that might sound a bit a- _paw_ -ling to one of the mechs in question!” He dropped into a fighting stance, narrowing his eyes at Mecha-Man. “But we can _iron_ out the details later.”

With a whirring sound, Mecha-Man’s arm pushed upward, straining against the leash directing it downward, and the new hero stumbled backward, releasing his arm. Mecha-Man trained one of his arm cannons on each of the heroes before turning his head slightly toward his accomplices. “Leave it and let’s get out of here!” Mecha-Man bellowed to them, one of whom had been in the process of collecting the gold coins that had fallen out of the crate and shoving them into his pockets. The one Iron Maiden had caught in her grappling hook threw off the rope and scrambled to his feet, following his companion’s example and stumbling into the truck’s open side panel. The truck peeled away the moment the doors were shut. “You won this round, heroes.” Mecha-Man shuffled to his right around Iron Maiden and the other hero, keeping them in his field of fire, his arm cannons not wavering, before he raced in the opposite direction from the truck, ran two blocks, and leapt over a restaurant and out of sight.

In the silence that followed the criminals’ departure, Iron Maiden finally had a moment to take in the scene of destruction surrounding her. The bank’s front door had caved in under the force of Mecha-Man’s pile driver fist – and that before she had even arrived. Smoke still poured out of the bank’s front door, with the orange glow of a lobby desk that had caught fire from her first wild shot still visible through the opening. Every car parked along the street overnight had been damaged; two were still burning, the light of the flames giving the scene an eerie quality. The street was pitted with new potholes where she and Mecha-Man had landed, with long scorch marks gouged through the pavement from the several times Mecha-Man’s energy blasts had missed her. The buildings on either side of the street had taken a handful of stray shots from energy weapons, pocking the façades with new damage. The metal crate of coins smoldered on the sidewalk, partially-melted coins scattered on either side. Through the smoky haze Iron Maiden could make out the flashing blue lights of police cars approaching from several blocks away.

“You’ve got some nerve, Dog Boy,” Iron Maiden growled, glaring at him under her helmet.

“ _I_ ’ve got some nerve?” he scoffed, giving his leash a casual twirl before collecting it together and securing it on his belt. “ _You_ ’re the one causing all the property damage here, not me!”

“All of this?” she demanded, throwing her arms out to encompass the scene. “None of this was _my_ fault! This was all Mecha-Man! _He_ was here first, and _I_ only came to stop him!”

“What about the crate _you_ shot?” he retorted, pointing at it, his eyes not leaving her faceplate. “Are you telling me _Mecha-Man_ made you shoot that?”

“No,” she replied. She advanced on him and poked him in the chest. “ _You_ did! If _you_ hadn’t gotten in my way, _I_ would have just pulled it away from them! Then there’s no need to destroy it to keep them from getting it!”

He scoffed. “And you’re telling me _I_ ’m the one who pulled the trigger on _you_ destroying a box that could have held a bunch of people’s priceless valuables?”

“It was either that or let them get away with their prize! I’d rather keep Mecha-Man from getting it, regardless of what that takes, than let them just get away with it!” She threw her arms down in frustration. “Ugh! I had everything under control until _you_ showed up!”

“It sure looked like it.” He raised an eyebrow dubiously, one hand resting on his hip. “So was that before or after you were cowering behind the car?”

She turned away and waved her hand at him dismissively. “If I never see you again, it will be too soon.”

“Fine,” he replied. She heard the leash whip through the air, and spun around, bringing one arm up to protect her head and pointing the other straight at the other hero. But instead she saw him standing in the same position with his leash caught around a streetlight further down the road. “Just let the _real_ hero take care of this kind of trouble next time.”

Iron Maiden stared at him silently, daring him to continue. Taking her silence as acceptance, however, he pulled himself into the air and flew away, swinging from building to building, angling roughly northward. Only once he was out of sight did she finally turn to head south toward the river, shaking her head and grumbling to herself darkly. “Jackass.”


	3. Chapter 3

As he tore down the street away from the carnage in front of the bank, Antoine slammed his fist on the steering wheel and let out a grunt of frustration. This was supposed to be a simple bank heist, just him, Gaston, and a couple of locals they’d picked up in a bar the other night. Quick, simple, and lucrative. The Lloyd’s had received a large shipment of new £1 coins from the mint that afternoon which was waiting to be sorted for distribution. Mecha-Man would break them into the bank – a process of no more than a minute for the suit – and provide cover while their hired English muscle carried the crates and bags of pre-packaged coins out to the waiting truck. If everything went according to plan they would have been in and out in less than 15 minutes and, after paying their hired guns and putting some aside for upgrades, he and Gaston would each have been about six figures richer. With the cops on the lookout for this serial killer/rapist, a bank job was bound to catch them off-guard – especially one with Mecha-Man as the muscle.

Not that the idea of the Stripper Ripper running around London and targeting young women was exactly a comfort otherwise for Antoine…

“What the hell happened back there?” he demanded, jerking the wheel hard to the left into another sharp turn down another winding side street, hardly paying attention to where he was going. Instead of taking any of the pre-scouted escape routes, he was just improvising, hoping not to see anyone following them – especially not anyone in a mech-suit. In the back of the truck the two thugs were thrown about by the momentum of the turns. One tumbled into the side of the truck with a startled yelp, and the shift nearly caused the truck to overturn. Loose coins rattled around in the handful of bags they had managed to load when the plan went to hell. He glanced down at the tablet balanced in a stand on the dashboard showing footage from the drone he’d programmed to observe the heist from the air. The screen showed a couple flares from burning cars and wreckage, the silhouettes of the two heroes dancing in the shadows cast through the smoke by fires and streetlights. Mecha-Man wasn’t visible on the screen, and as they finally parted the heroes didn’t seem to be following either Mecha-Man or the truck. At least that meant they were in the clear. For now. He turned back to the rearview mirror and glared at his passengers, hardly paying attention as he turned down yet another deserted street, one that would bring them a little closer to the river. “Well?”

The one on the left shrugged, grabbing onto a rack built into the side of the truck to stabilize himself. “I don’t know what happened,” he finally answered. “We was carrying out the loot when that other suit showed up and started blasting us.”

“Everything was fine one minute, and it all went to hell the next. We just grabbed what we could and ran,” added the other. He winced as a bag of coins rolled into his thigh. “It was lucky we managed to get these bags in while Mecha-Man was distracting that other.”

“Yeah, real lucky,” retorted Antoine, glaring back at them. “Instead of the crate of £50.000, you first grabbed a couple bags with maybe £7.500 in coins apiece – and none of the banknotes, which would at least have been lighter. All we need is a couple _hundred_ more jobs as ‘lucky’ as this one was and _maybe_ we can retire!”

“Hey, it wasn’t exactly their fault, boss,” argued Mecha-Man over the radio as the abandoned warehouse they had converted into their hideout came into view around the corner, Mecha-Man standing to one side of the locked gate with his arms folded. Antoine pulled to a stop in front of the gate as Mecha-Man undid the padlock and pushed the gate open just wide enough for the truck to fit through. Antoine stopped halfway across the yard and waited impatiently while Mecha-Man relocked the gate and jogged over to open the door. “That other mech-suit came out of nowhere and ambushed us. And then that dog hero showed up? We were lucky to get away period!”

“We would have been luckier if we had more than… about £30.000 to show for it,” Antoine grumbled, counting the bags quickly.

“So what does that mean for our cut?” the first guy asked, his lips turning down in a frown. “You said 10 Gs each …”

Antoine narrowed his eyes at him in the rearview mirror. “That original agreement assumed a _successful_ job, and we did _not_ succeed,” he informed him, surreptitiously withdrawing the energy pistol from his holster out of the man’s sight as he did so. He turned partway around in his seat and pointed the pistol through the seat at the man. “So you have two options. Option one: the two of you split one of those bags, each get around £3.250 for your trouble tonight, and we call you up in a day or two when we have another job – potentially a more lucrative one. Option two: the two of you _get_ split between several bags and dumped in the Thames and we bring in a couple _different_ lugs for the next job. So take your pick – I will be fine either way.”

The two men exchanged a look and stared past Antoine’s head at Mecha-Man, the glowing eyes of whose helmet illuminated the interior of the truck. Their eyes widened in fear. “I’ll take the payment,” the second one said, the first one nodding along fervently.

Antoine let out a relieved breath and smirked, holstering the pistol. “Good choice.”

As the two hired men carried the bags of coins over to a worktable, Antoine stepped outside to recover the drone that had finally made its way back to them. He inspected the rotor blades and struts carefully for damage, but found it still in working condition. He had to admit, although he did not have the same resources that Pegasus and the Heroes of Paris clearly had at their disposal, repurposing a cheap commercial drone was a simple but effective way to improve his ability to monitor their jobs. Unfortunately, this time the hero in the metal suit had appeared from the opposite direction and he hadn’t gotten more than fifteen seconds of forewarning. And they didn’t have the funds to add another drone to their setup just yet. The remaining £22.500 from this job would have to go to so many other improvements on the suit itself before they could even consider purchasing another drone.

“Any chance you can help me get this thing off?” Mecha-Man called from the other workbench, holding up a screwdriver and pair of pliers.

Antoine jogged over to join him. “You never had this much trouble getting out of the old suit,” he observed, selecting a wrench and smacking the side of one of the chest plate bolts that had gotten stuck. It made a hollow thud, and he squirted it with WD-40 before prying it out.

“Well, the old suit wasn’t held together by duct tape and silly putty, so…” Gaston finally got the helmet off and set it on the workbench before lifting one leg to undo the straps on the front. “Any chance we got enough for some improvements?”

“We didn’t get enough to replace the chest piece,” Antoine told him, frowning. “But my supplier did receive the miniature servos we need for the upgraded leg armor Those shouldn’t cost more than £5.000, leaving a little left over to get the new targeting circuitry for your arm cannons – hopefully that will cut down on the misses. If you pick up the parts in the shopping center parking lot in Soho tomorrow morning, I can get the installation finished after lunch.”

“If it means I can actually _move_ again, I’ll make a pick-up on the moon, boss!” Gaston joked, finally shrugging his way out of the armor. He furrowed his brows as he looked around the small warehouse. Their hired men were on the other side of the room dividing up their cut and arguing quietly, but he lowered his voice anyways. “Any chance you can give me any anti-miraculous weapons _now_?” he asked seriously. “The other suit was bad enough, but I could have handled him, at least long enough for us to get more of the loot. But that other guy, the dog hero? He was definitely using a miraculous. I mean, why else _that_ costume with _those_ stupid ears? Or carry around a dog leash like a weapon? And somehow his dog leash deflected my energy blasts. Definitely a miraculous. And if we’ve got a miraculous user running around now, I’d like _something_ I can use to counter him.”

Antoine shook his head. “No such luck,” he replied, detaching the chest plate and giving it a couple raps with his ball peen hammer to smooth out an old dent. He frowned at the flakes of rust knocked loose by the action. “The Prior wouldn’t part with any of his chi-putty, and since he didn’t let any of his novices come with us, we’re on our own.” He sighed. “I guess we’ll just have to come up with our own ‘anti-miraculous plans.’”

Gaston snorted and fingered one of the arm cannons. “Well if there’s heroes here in London, maybe our ‘anti-miraculous plan’ should include moving and setting up shop somewhere else,” he suggested. “Do you think Ireland has any heroes? Or the Low Countries?”

“As far as I am aware, neither of those places has heroes of its own,” Antoine acknowledged slowly, shaking his head. “However, as far as I was aware two hours ago, neither did London. Nor, for that matter, did Portugal – before those Heroes of Lisbon appeared on the Ladyblog and in Rouen over the summer.” He sighed in resignation and tossed his hammer on the workbench. “We’ll just have to accept it: there’s no guarantee anymore that we can go _anywhere_ and not find some sort of heroes waiting for us. And even if we did, what’s stopping locals from playing hero to try and stop us? _Or_ , for that matter, what’s stopping the Heroes of Paris from dropping in out of the blue to try and stop us?”

Gaston picked up a paintbrush and can of tan paint and hummed. “I’m just saying, it’s still a possibility,” he argued, going over to start repainting the truck where the paint had been melted off.

“Leave if you want to,” Antoine called after him. “But I’m staying. You know perfectly well why we chose London!”

Gaston chuckled in acknowledgment. “Is she taking your calls yet?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m seeing her tomorrow,” Antoine replied, allowing himself a small smile. He selected a wrench from the workbench and set about removing the old leg pieces that they would replace, placing the old pieces to the side where they might eventually be repurposed. So much of this suit was already repurposed from other parts and inventions that it was hard to imagine that less than a month ago they’d had a cutting-edge exo-suit in which Gaston was capable of going toe-to-toe against even Taureau Dechaine or Cat Noir and holding his own. Now he was lucky to escape from a miraculous user and someone in a knock-off mech-suit with his own suit intact. But all they needed was one or two successful jobs, and they would be back on top.


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning Felix entered the dining room to find his mother and Aunt Emilie sitting at the table in the dining room and sipping tea together while speaking quietly, Duusu and Barkk sitting on a saucer and working their way through a plate of mini scones. He collapsed into a chair, poured himself a mug of tea, and selected a pastry. “Did these come from Paris?” he asked, biting off half the croissant.

“They did!” Aunt Emilie confirmed, giving him a small smile. “Marinette brought a batch over just as I was getting ready to come, and said they were fresh from the oven.”

“I could get used to the fresh pastries,” he observed, finishing off his first and picking up a second one. “This right here might be worth the price of the portal ring!”

Aunt Emilie chuckled. “Pegasus does have some smaller ones,” she commented. “I may ask Tom and Sabine if they would consider taking standing orders for delivery!”

Felix finished his first and grabbed another one. “Any more nights like last night, and I might just put one of those up in my room for them to just keep passing these croissants through! This hero business certainly helps work up an appetite.”

Aunt Emilie hummed contemplatively, examining his face closely. “Your mother and I were just talking about that,” she began. “I hear you had a busy night.”

He ran a hand through his hair and stretched his shoulder muscles. “You might say that, Tante,” he agreed nervously. Both his aunt and mother gave him a curious look.

“We had an amazing workout last night, Guardian!” Barkk chirped excitedly, shoving an entire mini-scone into her mouth, followed by a strip of bacon. “Felix and I were talking about it on the way home yesterday. There was the rapist we stopped, and there was the guy in the metal suit – and there was another guy in a metal suit, too! I haven’t come across one of those in so long!” She swallowed her bacon and shrugged. “It’s nice to be out with a hero again.”

His mother pursed her lips and held up her newspaper, flicking the pages open between her and Felix. He looked a little closer at the newspaper’s front page. The major headline covering most of the page read “Keep the Change” over a picture of the Lloyd’s of London with its front door smashed in, burned out cars lining the street, and coins strewn up and down the sidewalk – if Felix couldn’t see the Lloyd’s sign in the background and the Queen’s imprint on the coins, he would have thought that photo had been taken in a warzone. The far column bore the headline “Rapist Eludes Police,” with a smaller subtitle “Woman Claims Miraculous Rescue.”

“I see they missed the Ripper last night,” Felix observed, frowning. “Too bad.”

“No thanks to you.” His mother carefully folded the paper and laid it beside her plate, giving him a hard look. Duusu looked up at her with wide eyes before turning to stare at Felix, shivering. Aunt Emilie furrowed her brows, eyes shifting between his mother and himself, and stroked the Kwami’s feathers until he closed his eyes. “What were you thinking, Felix?” his mother demanded.

He scoffed in annoyance. “I assumed your senti-dog could handle that Ripper twat,” he told her, waving a hand dismissively. “And I was needed elsewhere.”

“It was a bank robbery. The police can handle those.”

“Well, the police are _supposed_ to handle rapists, too,” he pointed out, annoyed.

“ _They_ weren’t there in that alley. _You_ were,” she told him, her lips set in a thin line. “You shouldn’t have left that woman behind just to respond to a bank robbery.”

“I didn’t exactly know what was going on there,” he argued irritably. “The police radio called it a ’10-43.’ That’s not a code I’ve heard before. I guess it means ‘super-crime.’”

“Even so, it was a bank robbery.” His mother frowned and fixed Felix with a disappointed look. “A bank robbery afterhours where no one was there to get hurt. A bank robbery at the bank where we just _happen_ to have our accounts?”

He shrugged. “Those guys could have stolen anything there!”

“ _Things_. They could have stolen _things_ there,” His mother pointed out, some bite to the words. “Do you want to know what happened after you left that alley last night?” she demanded heatedly. Aunt Emilie covered her hand with one of her own and gave her a calming look. His mother took a measured breath, looked down into her teacup, and continued, monotone, “That poor woman stumbled before she reached the street. The Ripper twisted his ankle when he landed, but he was still able to get back up. The senti-hound fended him off once – almost took a chunk out of his calf – before he fled the opposite direction. So I had to make a choice: the hound could either stay with the woman to protect her, or it could chase the Ripper and ensure that the police caught him. If I sent it after the Ripper, he could have eluded it and doubled back. I _had_ to keep the hound near her.” His mother finally looked up and met his eye. “The Ripper escaped because _I_ had to make a choice.” She knit her eyebrows together as she stared at him. “He got away, so now he is free to hurt any number of other women. And every woman he hurts, rapes, or kills from now on will be because of _us_.”

“I’m sorry about that, but what about the thousands of people with accounts at the bank?” he retorted. “What about them? If I hadn’t been there, maybe Mecha-Man would have emptied the bank out – money, jewelry, deposit boxes, everything. Does that not matter?”

His mother placed her elbow on the table and rested her forehead in her hand, rubbing her temples with two fingers. Aunt Emilie squeezed her hand gently before fixing her calming gaze on Felix. “Felix, sweetie,” she explained patiently, “being a hero means you have to learn what to prioritize. The people with accounts at the bank I’m sure would appreciate your consideration – but the woman who had just been assaulted needed your protection far more. The Stripper Ripper needed your _attention_ far more than Mecha-Man did in that moment. You were right there with the Stripper Ripper and could have stopped him for good, saving all his future victims from suffering. Saving even just a single life is far more valuable than lost property.”

Felix frowned. “So I should just ignore the many for the sake of the one?”

His mother raised an eyebrow and shared a look with Aunt Emilie. “Everything at the bank is insured,” she ground out through clenched teeth, looking him straight in the eye. “The money they stole will be replaced, whatever valuables were taken or damaged will be compensated. You _know_ this! And yet you ran off to protect the insured property, leaving behind the real, live woman who could have been hurt or killed! All to protect the bank holding _your_ things!” She looked at Aunt Emilie and shook her head. “I swear, Emmie…”

Aunt Emilie gave her a sympathetic look. “We all make mistakes, Ammie. No miraculous user can be perfect right away; even an experienced user can make mistakes.” A shadow passed though her eyes; when Felix looked closer, it was gone. She continued, more confidently, “A Guardian’s role is to guide the miraculous holder to become better.”

“Right.” His mother closed her eyes, took a slow breath, and sighed, releasing the tension in her shoulders. Turning back to Felix, she asked, calmly, “Tell me, what did Carapace teach you about being a hero?”

Felix scoffed. “‘Heroes look out for the needs of others, not their own needs,’” he recited, rolling his eyes. “Honestly, the guy said it so often he should get it tattooed on his arse!”

“ _The guy_ is not wrong,” his mother reminded pointedly. “Adrien and Marinette gave you that miraculous to help _other_ people, not to just help _yourself_.”

“Felix,” Aunt Emilie began, “I know you meant well last night.” His mother gave her a disbelieving look and a subtle headshake, but Aunt Emilie raised her eyebrows and nodded to her insistently. “You meant well, but you have to put the needs of others ahead of yourself. And nothing is more important than protecting another person’s life. What is the miraculous you hold?”

Felix sighed. “It’s the Miraculous of Loyalty,” he answered, fingering the dog collar around his neck as he said it.

“And what does that mean?”

“Loyalty to my team and my people, not just to myself,” he grumbled.

“That’s right!” Barkk squeaked, clapping her paws excitedly. “And you never found someone as loyal as the Hound!”

“Perhaps that’s not true yet of _this_ Hound,” his mother observed wryly, giving him a look. “But you _can_ change that.”

“What’s wrong with helping the most people?”

His mother frowned. “What’s wrong is that I _know_ that wasn’t really your mindset at the time.” She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “What if my hound hadn’t been there? Would you have left that poor woman to be raped and murdered? Would you still have run off?”

“But your hound _was_ there. The woman survived and I stopped the robbery, even if the robbers got away.” Felix pushed himself away from the table.

“Where are you going?”

“After last night, I have some research to do,” he replied woodenly. “I need to find out everything I can about that Mecha-Man character. And about this new suit.” Barkk took off from the table and hovered next to Felix’s head. “I’ll be in my room.”

“First give your favorite aunt a kiss?” Aunt Emilie teased, smiling.

“Of course,” he agreed, “though there isn’t much competition for the title!” He rounded the table and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. As he leaned back, she put a hand on his shoulder, holding him in place.

“You have it in you to become a great hero,” she whispered into his ear. “Or you have it in you to simply look on and do nothing. You come from a family of miraculous users who did both – who helped others and who sat on the sidelines and did nothing as others were hurt around them.”

“I’m not Adrien,” he whispered back. His whole life, he had been compared to his bubbly, over-the-top-happy cousin. “I’m never going to be another Cat Noir.”

“No, you aren’t,” she agreed, squeezing his shoulder gently. “Nor does anyone want or expect you to be. You are Felix; all you have to be is your own hero.”

Felix nodded and straightened up. “Thanks, Tante,” he told her. His mother gave him a look like she was going to say something else, but he left before she could say it. Racing up the stairs he flopped on the couch in his bedroom with his computer and opened the Ladyblog.

“What are we looking for, Felix?” asked Barkk eagerly, settling on his stomach and staring wide-eyed at the screen.

Felix idly rubbed the Kwami’s head between her ears, and she started wagging her tail in contentment. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I know Adrien’s gang have some experience with this Mecha-Man fellow, but I don’t remember him saying anything about how to fight him. And I’m almost certain the Ladyblog never said anything about _another_ man in a mechanized suit running around Paris.”

“Didn’t Nino say his girlfriend _runs_ the Ladyblog?” Barkk asked, finding a chicken drumstick she’d saved from dinner the previous night and gnawing at one end. “You could ask her. Or you could ask Pegasus.”

Felix frowned and slowly shook his head. “I don’t need their help,” he answered finally. “Didn’t they give me a miraculous so I could use it to protect London?”

“I think Marinette’s plan was for you to be a part of their team,” the Kwami observed, fixing her enormous eyes on him. “The Canine Miraculous all work best as part of a team, not on their own. Even when he and the Fox were separated by distance, they were still part of the same team and working together. And on the frontlines, the Hound was part of a team with the other men in his unit.”

“Well, I’m not much of a team player,” Felix pointed out, clicking the link to read an article on the Ladyblog describing one of Ladybug’s fights against Mecha-Man.

“You have _me_ on your team,” Barkk told him quietly, curling up on his chest and closing her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are wondering about the lack of update yesterday (and so far today), FF.net has been down since Sunday. Given that I've finally caught up between the two sites, I don't want to start publishing more here before it is fixed there. Hopefully they sort their stuff out soon...


	5. Chapter 5

“Did you hear about what happened last night?”

Bri hummed in mild disinterest and raised an eyebrow at her flatmate, pulling out one of her earbuds and pausing her music. It was a little before noon the next day, the sun was shining without a cloud in the sky, and they had just crossed the street off the College campus and turned onto the Strand. “No, what happened?”

Anne held up her phone to show two sketch artist’s renditions of a man with a shaggy mane of hair, dark glasses, and a thinning beard. In the second one bruises covered half the man’s face. “Another Ripper attack. The victim survived, but the Ripper escaped.” Unconsciously she fingered her tree necklace. “Do you see those eyes? I know it’s just a drawing, but… that monster is seriously dead inside.”

“Well, it looks like someone tried to make the _outside_ match the inside,” observed Bri wryly, nodding to the second drawing. She quickly skimmed through the rest of the story. News of the Stripper Ripper hadn’t broken yet when she made her choice to attend King’s College London; if it had, perhaps that would have changed her college decision. The idea of going to school in a serial killer’s backyard didn’t exactly sit well. Though considering her lycée years… “It doesn’t say here how he got away,” she commented, rereading the paragraph. “ _Or_ how the woman survived, just that she was too traumatized to give more than this description of her attacker… huh.” She frowned. “It says here the cops saw a dog near the scene when they arrived.”

“So?”

“So it was _blue_. Do _you_ know of any blue dogs?”

“Personally?” Anne laughed. “No, but I thought unusual was your area of expertise, Mademoiselle Parisienne!”

Bri poked her in the side with her elbow. “You know I left to get _away_ from the ‘unusual’ stuff, right?”

Anne rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, lycée was too interesting and all that. Personally I don’t see what the fuss is about; the Ladyblog made Paris sound absolutely deadly!” She ran a hand through her long red hair, pulled it over her shoulder, and nodded toward the outdoor café they were nearing. “Speaking of interesting…”

Bri pursed her lips and bit back a groan. Right. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Yeah…” Anne’s voice trailed off. “Later.” She shook her head, smiled confidently, and patted Bri on the arm before picking up her pace and walking briskly down the street toward the tavern where she tended bar. “Have a good lunch,” she called behind her.

Bri turned into the café patio and found her father sitting at a small table near the gate, facing the street. He waved her over with a bright smile, and she dropped into the chair opposite him, picking up the menu in front of her without a word. Summer hadn’t even ended yet officially, and the days were still warm enough to wear shorts if she cared to, but the warmth of the sun couldn’t take away the chill she felt just sitting across from her father. Although he had called her almost weekly since she moved to London in June shortly after her graduation, she had always allowed the calls to go to voicemail – only to delete the messages without listening to them. And then yesterday he had sent a text message saying he was in town on “business” and inviting her for lunch near campus today. She had almost refused to answer.

Almost.

“How are you, honey?” her father asked, glancing at her over the menu and putting on an eager smile.

She didn’t look up from the menu. “Just super.”

“And school?”

“It’s fine.”

“So what’s good here?” her father asked, laying his menu down open in front of him on the table. “As convenient as this place is, I’m sure you eat here all the time!”

Bri shrugged. “Not too often,” she replied. “Eating out costs money.”

“You know I would be happy to help you pay for school – and any other expenses.”

She scoffed. “I don’t need _your_ money, Papa. I have a job; I’m fine paying for everything on my own.”

He gave her an indecipherable look. “Well, at least let me pay for this meal, then.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Whatever.” She turned back to the menu, staring hard at it without actually seeing anything, the music playing in her ears a welcome distraction.

_“Everybody has a different way  
_ _To view the world”…_

The lunch menu at this particular café was short, only a small number of options. Of the bunch, the only one she ever chose on those days she didn’t have time to pack a lunch before running to the repair shop was the fish and chips. There was a small picture of a trout on the menu in the middle of jumping into a fishing boat, a cartoon fisherman in exaggerated waders holding a net directly under it. _But what’s the most expensive menu item…_

Her father sighed, pulling her attention away from memorizing the menu. “You know, Bri, if you’d stayed closer to home for University, you wouldn’t have this problem. You wouldn’t have to pay tuition, you could have lived at home, and we could have seen each other every day,” he observed, a wistful expression in his eyes.

“You’re right: we could have,” she agreed evenly, turning off her music, stowing her earbuds, and focusing all her attention on him. “And yet I chose King’s College over PSL. So what does that tell you?”

He studied her face for a moment and frowned. “It tells me I must have done _something_ to upset you, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what,” he replied, a troubled look in his eye, as the waiter came to take their orders. “But whatever it is, if you would just tell me, maybe we could make it better.

Suddenly left without a menu to hide behind, Bri placed one elbow on the table in front of her and ran her other hand through her bright blue bob cut hair. Perhaps she could tell him exactly what was on her mind. But would that change anything? One look at her father’s face and she knew her answer. “What’s the point?” she asked rhetorically. “Let’s just say I wanted a chance to practice my English.”

Her father furrowed his brows and frowned. “Well, it’s been rather quiet at home without you,” he observed. “The apartment has been so empty since you left. Your mother–”

“Don’t try to use Maman against me,” she interrupted, seething.

He fell silent, examining her quietly. “Very well. All the same, Paris has been rather… dull.”

She scoffed. “Not according to the news. Hell, it sounds like I left just in time!”

“What do you mean?”

She took a sip of her iced tea and arched an eyebrow. “As far as I can tell, there’s been war in the streets all summer between superheroes and super-villains. In fact, according to the Ladyblog, that Night Bat character and his _cronies_ got their asses handed to them all up and down the Seine for a month!”

Her father smiled thinly. “Yes, I suppose it has been rather… exciting in Paris recently,” he allowed. “Perhaps it’s a good thing you’re in London where it’s nice and quiet–”

“Not _too_ quiet,” she muttered under her breath.

“–where you can focus on your studies,” he finished, seeming not to have heard her. “Even with this rapist serial killer running loose.” He gave her a worried look. “You’re staying safe, right?” he asked. “If you need, I can get you–” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “If anything–”

“I’m being careful, Papa,” she promised, sighing. One hand drifted unconsciously to her other wrist. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m just treating him like a constant Akuma drill from a few years ago.” She shrugged: maybe Hawk Moth had been good for _something_ …

He let out a relieved breath. “That’s good to hear, though you know I’m always going to worry about you. You may be a country away, but you’re still my little girl.” He was quiet for a moment, giving her a fond look. Eventually he shook his head and coughed. “But perhaps a cheerier topic is in order. How are your classes going?”

“They’re going fine, Papa,” she assured him. “Mathematics for Engineers is still reviewing the basics – I can almost sleep through that one. And we just started building circuits this morning in Mechanics for Engineers.”

He snorted in amusement. “ _That_ ’s what your tuition is going toward? You’ve been wiring circuits since you were six!”

Bri grinned. “Yeah, the TA was a little surprised when I had my circuit finished in half the time. It didn’t look anything like the model, but it was still twice as efficient!”

“That’s my girl!” he cheered, clapping enthusiastically.

“When I showed him your wiring method he was suitably impressed,” she agreed. She shifted in her chair to find a more comfortable position and dug into the fish and chips that the server had just dropped off. “So much of what I know came from you,” she admitted.

Her father gave her a gentle smile. “And I couldn’t be more proud,” he acknowledged, taking a sip of beer before starting on his ploughman’s lunch. “You’ve grown up so much since the days when we were building models from kits together!”

“Hopefully we’ll start building some of those things for real soon!” she commented. “I already have a few ideas for my final project third year, though there’s still time to decide.”

“‘Still time’…” her father echoed, shaking his head. “You only just started, sweetheart! Three years is a long time. The world of engineering will be worlds different just by the end of _this_ year, to say nothing of next year.”

“Oh, I know,” she agreed, nodding. “Robotics alone has made tremendous advances just in the last year. Who would have thought something like Mecha-Man was even possible two years ago, but now look where it has gotten to?”

“Where indeed…” her father mused. He blinked a couple times and nodded to her wrist bracelets. “I see you still have those. Have you made any improvements since the design schematic you showed me last spring?”

“Some,” she confirmed, twisting her wrist back and forth. The bracelet fit snugly around her forearm, around six centimeters wide and under a centimeter in thickness, with a clear screen on the top of her arm, a clasp on the bottom to remove it, and a couple ports along the edge closest to her wrist. “The power source is still pretty weak, so even though each one has the memory and processing speed to do much more, at the moment it can’t handle more than basic computing functions – only marginally better than a graphing calculator or a smart phone. But once I get that power issue resolved I already have some ideas of how to give it more functionality. I’ve got something pretty exciting in mind!”

“I could help you with your power problem,” he offered. “I have a new power source I’ve been playing around with lately for some of my own projects.”

She snorted quietly. “I think I’m good.”

Her father shrugged in resignation. “Have you considered patenting it and selling it?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Wearable technology is all the rage these days, and if your bracelet catches on you could be set for life!”

She shook her head. “I’d rather keep it for myself – definitely until it’s perfect, and probably even after that.” She glanced down at the display. “Speaking of, I need get going: my shift starts in fifteen minutes, and I can’t afford to be late.”

“I’ll be in town a while longer for business,” her father told her as she stood up. “Can we do this again?”

She looked into his eyes. So much had happened… “I don’t know,” she replied evasively.

“Okay.” He sighed, a tear in his eye. “I just want you to know how proud I am and that I… I love you.”

She nodded, but couldn’t bring herself to smile. “I love you, too, Papa.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Given that I write my (multi-chapter) stories in their entirety before publishing chapter 1, I never intend to go 3 days without publishing anything new in the middle of a story. Unfortunately, FF.net has been broken since Sunday, and I also didn't want to just keep going on here without it actually publishing there. But I'm done waiting for them to get their act together. It's still going up there, but no one can see it. So if you came over here from FF.net, let me know you found it!


	6. Chapter 6

Antoine was almost floating on cloud nine when he returned to their warehouse hideout after lunch. Bridgette was still closed off to him, but she had answered his text. And she had met him for lunch. It wasn’t back to normal. He didn’t have another time scheduled to meet up with her. But after her complete silence toward him all summer, he would consider this to be progress. Maybe before they returned to Paris he would have another opportunity to see her.

Now if only he knew what had caused her to suddenly become so cold and distant toward him.

“Looks like lunch was good for you!” observed Gaston, who was dragging a large box over to the workbench. He pushed it up against the bench next to a second box, straightened up, and wiped his brow. “If we’re going to stay here for a while, maybe we should invest in a dolly or something. This stuff is heavy.”

“After this you’ll be able to use the suit to haul around any larger components,” Antoine assured him. “Once we get these new plates and servos installed, we won’t need to make any major upgrades to the legs for a while – only adding a layer of heat shielding if we can manage it.”

“That’s good, because these boxes must weigh 150 kilos each!”

Antoine grabbed a knife from the bench and slit the box open. He nodded approvingly on seeing row after row of miniature servos, all with wires coming out of one end. The other box, rather than servos, contained metal sheets of various thicknesses, silvery in color. “I can work with this,” he determined, glancing up at Gaston. He flipped a switch to turn on his miniature forge. “Give me until tomorrow and I will have the legs finished. And there may be enough material here to replace the most badly-damaged sections of the chest piece.”

“Good; the old chest piece is really starting to show its age.” Gaston clapped him on the shoulder and walked over to the door. Over his shoulder he called, “I’m going to check around town. See what I can dig up about these two heroes.”

While the forge heated up, Antoine started the plasma torch to start cutting out the correct shapes for the new leg pieces. He grimaced at the device; he would much rather have brought the plasma torch from his workshop in Paris, but that would have raised too many questions from Night Bat – and the less Night Bat and Lynchpin knew about their trip to London, the better. At least until they could return to Paris with a complete, upgraded suit. So a hand-me-down plasma torch scavenged from an industrial site would have to do.

Once the pieces were all cut on the plasma torch, Antoine heated the metal and curved it to fit together properly on his small anvil. With the sound of the forge and clink of his hammer the only sounds in the warehouse, he found his thoughts drifting to the projects he had done with his daughter. From an early age he had known that Bridgette was destined to be an engineer like him. Where other girls her age had been interested in dolls and tea parties, she had always enjoyed building things. She had constructed a working mechanical crane at eight years old. She had started learning computer programming around the same age. But even more than that it was her creativity: she could look at a mechanical problem and work out the perfect solution faster than most engineers could even identify all the variables. That was when he had known that she was going places. With training, she would become an even better engineer than he was.

Unfortunately, sending her to a science and technology lycée that would challenge her and help foster that creativity was going to be expensive, and when she had entered collège he had realized his salary wasn’t going to be enough to cover it. That was when the trouble had started.

The hammer slipped in his hand and he let out a low curse, dropping the plate and sticking his stinging thumb in his mouth. Even five years later it still hurt. It wasn’t fair! His microchip had been revolutionary! His invention had placed the company on the map, allowed them to revolutionize the growing field of machine-assisted human activity. And yet the company had paid him no more than his regular salary. His invention had made them hundreds of millions of Euros in the first two years alone, and he had received the same measly €135k he would have received anyways! That was enough to cover their usual expenses, but not enough to also afford the best lycée for Bridgette. When he’d gotten the offer to deliver his microchip to a competitor, he had wrestled with the decision for weeks before finally agreeing to it.

Unfortunately, one of his coworkers had been in the park at the same time and seen the handoff.

The evidence against him had been circumstantial at best; the criminal case had been dropped due to lack of evidence. But after the bad publicity of the investigation, the buyer had refused to pay and his own employer had fired him. Not only that, but they had blacklisted him so no other company would hire him. When he had contacted the buyer and threatened to go public if they didn’t give him a job, they had threatened a countersuit against _him_ for defamation! The best job he had been able to find was as a collège math teacher, a significant pay cut that had hardly paid their bills, let alone private school tuition. Bridgette had attended the general lycée instead of the science and technology school. Yet even with that she had continued to flourish and improve, largely by studying on her own. She’d had her pick of universities, and Antoine had wanted for her to have the best chance at success. Tuition in-country was free, but there were so many other possible expenses that could arise, especially if she wanted to work on her own projects on the side.

This time, when the Lynchpin had approached him, he had not hesitated to accept the new job. After all, the Lynchpin had promised him the opportunity to do what he loved _and_ receive a lucrative salary for doing it.

There was a bitter irony in the fact that, despite having earned more than enough money from Lynchpin to pay for Bridgette’s tuition, she hardly wanted anything to do with him.

The warehouse door creaked open, loud in the silence of the warehouse, and Antoine looked up, his hand drifting to the energy pistol he’d set on the bench while he worked. Gaston stepped inside and shut the door carefully behind him, taking one last look around the outside yard before turning away from the door. “We might have another chance,” he announced, crossing to lean against Antoine’s workbench. “The Royal Mint is making drops at all the branches this week, and I got a glimpse at the driver’s schedule while he was in a bank making a delivery. I know which branches they will visit today and tomorrow. We play it just like yesterday, and maybe this time it works out.”

Antoine frowned and ran a diagnostic on his tablet to confirm that the servos on the left leg he had just finished were actuating in sync. “We’ve already done that once, and with mixed success,” he pointed out. “You do know what the definition of insanity is, right? So what if instead of targeting one of the branches they visit we target the armored truck itself? There’s more loot on the truck, and the truck is a possible getaway vehicle if we plan it right.”

Gaston nodded slowly and picked up a map to spread across another table. He poked several locations on the map as Antoine watched over his shoulder. “This driver is going to start here tomorrow, and then go to these banks afterward. But if we set up _here_ … we can get the whole shipment, less the first delivery.”

Antoine looked more closely and shook his head. “Here,” he told him, selecting a different spot on the map. “If we pick a spot at the very beginning of the run, we won’t know exactly when it will get there; after that first stop we can time it and gauge traffic conditions. I’ll write up a quick algorithm to predict the route based on time of deliveries and traffic, and we’ll know exactly where the truck is and when it will arrive at the ambush location. It means losing out on some of the take, but I think it’s a better chance of success.”

Gaston shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

“What did you find out about these heroes?” asked Antoine, putting a few drops of lubricant on a bolt before starting to reassemble the leg.

“Zilch.”

Antoine cocked his head and stopped what he was doing. “Nothing?”

“They’re ghosts.” Gaston furrowed his brows. “No one knew anything about that other suit, just what the papers managed to catch from last night – a couple grainy photos. As far as I can tell, no one had ever even heard of that mechanical suit guy before he threw down with me. And as for the dog?” He shrugged. “A couple sightings here and there over the last month or so, but nothing beyond that.”

“So they’re new.” Antoine straightened up and cracked his neck. “That’s good.”

Gaston gave him a dubious look. “You think it’s a _good_ thing that we got our asses handed to us by a couple rookies.”

“If they’re new, that means they are inexperienced,” explained Antoine. “They will make mistakes. Meanwhile, we have been fighting the Heroes of Paris for months. You’ve fought Taureau Dechaine and Cat Noir to a draw. We know what we’re doing, and we have the equipment to fight them.”

“If you say so.” Gaston frowned. “I’d still feel better if the suit were in a little better shape and we had some anti-miraculous weapons in the arsenal again.” He looked at the partially-disassembled suit legs and cocked his head. “How is it going, anyways?”

“Don’t worry; it will be ready in time,” Antoine assured him. He sighed wistfully, his eyes following where Gaston looked.

“Thinking about your daughter again?” Gaston gave him a knowing smile. “It’s only been a couple weeks, and I already miss little Richard.”

Antoine nodded ruefully. “Doing this, I can’t stop thinking about when we would build robots together while she was growing up. We bought the sets, but we only ever mixed and matched to create our own designs.” He sighed. “I think that’s when I knew she was going to be an engineer.”

Gaston snorted. “Richard loves playing with Legos, but I have no illusions of him becoming the next Gustave Eiffel! He probably won’t follow me into this particular line of work, but that’s fine by me: I’d rather he _didn’t_ join the family business.”

Antoine chuckled. “While I am thrilled that she is studying to become an engineer like me, I want to keep Bri as far away from this particular ‘family business’ as I can,” he agreed. “I want her to have a chance at a decent life, without being defined by my mistakes.”

Gaston nodded and clapped him on the back. “Good luck with that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I… may have binge-watched a bunch of Hacksmith videos recently…
> 
> A note on French schooling: I know public school and university are both free in France, but as far as I can tell the specialized lycées such as Antoine describes would have additional tuition. And based on their website King’s College is not free.


	7. Chapter 7

The sun was just setting when Felix raced down the stairs from his bedroom into the front hall, stretched his arms, and whistled for Barkk to join him. His mother followed the Kwami down the hallway from their “Hero Study,” already transformed. Similar to Aunt Emilie, she had a sky-blue ankle-length gown with pink shoulder-sleeves and train of peacock feathers. Covering her eyes was a pink masquerade mask, clasped in the back with a bunch of peacock feathers woven into her platinum-blonde hair. La Paonne Deux gave Felix a quick peck on the cheek as Barkk nuzzled his ear in greeting. A senti-falcon chirped and landed on Felix’s hand, fixing him with a piercing gaze. “I see I am to practice my falconry tonight,” he observed, arching an eyebrow.

“It is a lost art for an English gentleman to practice,” La Paonne Deux replied, smiling. “Now do be careful, dear!” she called after him as Felix shrugged out of her embrace and found the mansion’s front door. He threw it open and ran outside, the Kwami hovering next to his head. He threw the senti-falcon into the air, where it caught a wind current and took station high above his head. “I can help you tonight, but this may be the last time for a while!”

That was the trouble with his mother only sharing a miraculous with Aunt Emilie: she had initially come that morning to bring the Peacock Miraculous back to Paris with her; Felix’s run-in with the Stripper Ripper had changed that plan for tonight, but Aunt Emilie would be back tomorrow. At that point, Felix would be on his own for a few days before Aunt Emilie returned with the Butterfly. “I’m always careful, Mother!” he replied just before the door closed. He jumped into his Bentley, revved the engine, and was off. Barkk settled into the passenger seat next to him, nibbling on the package of dried beef he’d left in the center console for her.

“What are we doing tonight?” the Kwami asked eagerly, her tongue hanging out in excitement.

Felix smiled at his Kwami’s infectious enthusiasm and settled back in his seat to listen to the car engine’s purr. His face fell. “The Ripper is still out there.”

“Maybe he’ll take a night off?” Barkk suggested hopefully.

Felix hummed. “Normally he does go quiet for a few days after an attack,” he agreed, “but will that hold true when he _failed_ last night?” He shrugged noncommittally. “Course, we gave him enough of a thrashing last night he probably needs a few days to recover!” That was the only positive to come out of the previous night’s encounter: hopefully the Ripper’s sprained ankle would slow him down for now. “And there’s still Mecha-Man,” he added with a frown. Unfortunately, the day’s research had proven less than useful. “After last night… All that property damage and for what? The Times said he only got away with a few grand.”

“At least we stopped him from getting more,” Barkk consoled him, fixing him with her enormous eyes. “Whatever we do tonight sounds good to me!” Barkk climbed up the door to sit on the window frame. She phased her head through the glass, and in the side mirror Felix could see her with her tongue hanging out in the wind, eyes closed.

“You know I could just roll down the window for you like a normal dog, right?”

Barkk pulled her head back in and gave him a confused look. “Now where’s the fun in that?” With that she stuck her head back through the window glass, leaving Felix alone with his thoughts.

He frowned as he eyed the sparse traffic. This wasn’t exactly what he had signed up for when he accepted the Dog Miraculous from Marinette. At that time over the summer, the Stripper Ripper was the only thing in the headlines, but the accounts were all in agreement that he was just a _pervert_ , not a _super_ -pervert. Well, he’d faced down the pervert once and failed to send him to prison, and now there was an _actual_ bona fide super-villain in town. Not only that, but there was another person in town trying to play hero… and wearing the same kind of mechanized suit as Mecha-Man wore. What was his deal? As the kilometers ticked away, he kept coming back to that question, though without finding a satisfactory answer. He sighed. Whoever he was, they could do with a little less of the fireworks from now on – otherwise his mother might never speak to him again! And with this as near to his last night at home before returning to Eton…

How would he stop _either_ of these criminals once he was at school, close to an hour away from London?

Felix pulled into a mostly-deserted overnight parking lot on the north end of London and glanced over at Barkk. As they had neared the outskirts of town and traffic had picked up, the Kwami had pulled her head back inside the car and picked out another piece of beef. She swallowed it whole and nodded up at him, eyes shining with excitement. “Ready when you are, Hound!”

“Barkk, Ears back!”

A moment later, the Hound slipped the car door open and dropped into the shadow the car cast in the light coming from the streetlamp just on the other side of the fence. He crept down the length of his own car, darted across into the shadow of the closest car in the next aisle, and straightened up, racing across the parking lot at breakneck speed. He detached his leash from his belt and threw it up to loop around the crossbar of a light pole one aisle in from the fence and swung himself up around it, releasing the pole at the apex of his swing and twisting around in a back-flip to land perched on top of the fence. Confidently he ran the length of the fence before pushing off to land on the roof of the storefront closest to the parking lot. His ears twisted this way and that, alert for any sound of a disturbance. The only sound he could hear was the subtle flapping of wings above him as the senti-falcon began its own circuit of the city.

“How are you doing, sweetie?” came his mother’s voice over the communicator in his ear.

“Just fine, Mother,” he replied, jumping the gap between two buildings. “I only left the car a minute ago; not much trouble I can get into in that time!”

“I know you better than to believe that!” she chastised, a hint of amusement in her voice. “There’s nothing on the police radio at the moment,” she informed him. “All the same, do be careful. I do wish you weren’t out there alone or with nothing but a senti-helper for support all the time.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’ll be careful, Mother.” The Hound raced across the rooftops above deserted streets, his own footsteps the only sound he could hear in the quiet commercial district. The shops had all closed up hours ago; the bars would still be packed for at least another few hours before the revelers left to return to their homes. As he passed the Lloyd’s of London branch from the night before, he noticed that the damaged vehicles had all been towed away during the day and the front door had been replaced, though the melted scores across the street left behind by the discharges of so many energy weapons had yet to be repaired.

A pity Ladybug didn’t ordinarily make house calls.

Two blocks down his ears perked up on hearing a sound like the activation of an energy weapon. His eyes narrowed suspiciously, his head turned slowly to narrow down the direction. He frowned: it seemed to be coming from the direction of the river near the east end of the city, but what targets were over _there_? City Hall? “I’m going to investigate something on the East End,” he reported. “Have the falcon keep circling.”

“Let me know if you need emergency.”

With a sigh, the Hound took the next right turn, flipped across the street, and cut across the block over rooftops until he found himself on the roof of a warehouse overlooking an otherwise-deserted loading yard. In the center of the yard was the new mechanical suit he had encountered the previous night, standing stock-still with its arms out to either side. Suddenly orange fire poured from a spot on its back, causing the Hound to raise a hand instinctively to shield his eyes from the brightness. The suit lifted a meter into the air and hovered for a moment before settling back to the ground.

The Hound dropped to the ground, landing silently on all fours, and sauntered out into the yard toward the suit. “Fancy running into you here,” he called. “Not to make _light_ of the situation,” he added, smirking.

“Something you want, Dog Boy?” the suit responded, the voice mechanically distorted.

He clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “Is that any way to speak to a superhero?” he asked, shaking his head in mock disappointment.

The helmet raised and lowered, looking him down. “I don’t see a superhero,” came the reply. “I just see a wannabe who likes getting in the way.”

“Oh, _I_ ’m the one getting in the way?” he scoffed, rolling his eyes. “ _I_ could have handled yesterday’s little ‘trouble’ just fine without your help.”

“I’m sure,” snorted the suit, shaking its helmet. “You definitely had it well under control while I did all the work!”

“What was that?” he demanded heatedly.

“What’s going on there?” his mother’s voice came through the communicator. The Hound hit a button on his leash handle to disconnect the call.

“I said… ‘I did all the work’!” It slapped its chest plate for emphasis. “ _I_ showed up the moment Mecha-Man arrived. _I_ fought him and kept him occupied. _I_ prevented him from getting away with more than he got. If anything, _I_ could have handled it just fine without _you_!”

The Hound scoffed. “I so want to rip that stupid suit off of you right now.”

The suit turned to stare at the Hound. “Want to put that to the test, Puppy? That’s a lot of talk coming from a teacup poodle!”

The Hound let out a grunt of frustration and threw his leash at the suit’s head. The suit ducked under the leash but reached up to grab it as it passed. It took a step back and tugged on the leash, pulling the Hound off balance. His feet left the ground, and he let out an involuntary yelp. He sailed toward the suit, one arm swung at his face, and the Hound contorted his body around the arm. He dropped to the ground and pulled on the leash, swinging the suit up into the air. The suit lifted two meters into the air before the jetpack activated, holding it suspended three meters above the ground, leaving the Hound dangling with his feet mere centimeters above the asphalt. He released the leash’s hold on the suit and dropped to the ground. The suit flew above him and dropped down behind him, swinging both arms together at his head. The Hound dove forward and rolled to his feet, spinning around and bringing up his arms in front of his face a moment before the suit punched him. He ducked below the punch and threw one of his own at the suit’s chest. A clang rang through the warehouse yard, but the suit didn’t budge. As the suit threw a punch of its own, the Hound sidestepped and swung around to kick the suit in the back. The suit stumbled slightly off-balance, and he followed it up with a second kick. This time, however, the suit was ready and grabbed his leg, swinging him up and slamming him to the ground on his back, the asphalt buckling under him. He kicked out with his free leg, caught the suit in the forearm, and wrenched his foot out of its grip. The suit lumbered forward as he threw his legs over his head in a backward somersault. He raised his fists defensively as the suit did the same.

Flashing blue lights in the distance drew the Hound’s attention, even as the suit turned to stare. As the lights approached, the suit looked back at him and made a sound like laughter. “I guess we’ll have to finish this later.” It shot up into the air on its jetpack. “See you around, Doggy,” it called behind it.

“My _name_ is ‘the Hound’!” he shouted after it. “I’ll be waiting for that,” he promised quietly, staring after it as it followed the river upstream until it vanished into the darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amelie’s hero suit is almost identical to Emilie’s from “The Woman out of the Fridge” [chapter 12](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26747443/chapters/66506734); the only real difference is that their hair is different colors.


	8. Chapter 8

Bri hunched over her tablet, scribbling furiously as she worked through the last algebra problem on her assignment. The TA had finished the lecture in half the time and decided to hand them an extra exercise for practice, so Bri had taken her assignment down to the campus library, where she had found Anne sitting at a table piled high with books, researching a paper for one of her British history classes. On seeing her, Anne had pushed a stack of books about Roman Britain to one side to make room. The exercise almost finished, Bri couldn’t quite manage to stifle her yawn. Without looking away from her notes she felt around for the coffee cup next to her tablet and took another long pull.

Sitting across the table from her, Anne gave her a sympathetic look. “Another late night, girl?” she whispered, kicking her shin under the table.

“You have no idea,” replied Bri, equally softly. She covered her mouth to hide yet another yawn and twisted her neck in both directions to pop it.

“You probably shouldn’t be staying out so late with a serial killer on the loose,” Anne pointed out.

Bri scoffed. “Last I checked, you aren’t my mother!”

Anne shook her head affectionately. “So does this ‘special project’ you’ve been working late on for as long as I’ve known you have a name?” Anne smirked. “Is he cute?”

Bri choked, nearly spitting her coffee all over the table. She eyed Anne carefully, her lips twisting up in a grin. “Maybe you do it differently where you come from, but where _I_ come from you don’t kiss and tell!”

“Oh, so there’s _kissing_ going on with Mr. Project!” Anne batted her eyelashes, stifling her giggles.

Bri rolled her eyes. “Did I say that?” she asked innocently.

Anne ran her fingers through her loose hair and giggled. “Fine, keep your secrets. But I’d prefer not to walk in on you and Mr. Project in the flat!”

Bri let out an amused snort. Considering that Anne had watched her install the new touch screen on one of her bracelets last week at the kitchen table, it was a little late for that! She finished the problem and circled her answer before reaching out to stretch one arm.

_“For the passion, for the glory,  
_ _For the memories, for the money”…_

The song paused as her bracelet screen blinked bright red once. She quickly stopped the music and tapped the message. With a quick glance at the details she shoved her books, laptop, and tablet into her bag, and stood up.

Anne yelped and stared wide-eyed at her sudden flurry of activity. “What–?”

“Sorry, girl, someone called in sick and the work orders are seriously piling up,” Bri explained hurriedly. “I’ll see you later.”

“Okay, but–”

“Gotta run!” Bri walked out of the library as quietly as she could, the rush of adrenaline pumping through her veins pushing her to move _faster_. The moment she was out of the library proper and into the main building she picked up the pace, speed-walking past classrooms and offices, her footsteps echoing loudly on the tiled floor. She sped up with every step, until she practically ran out the door, taking the steps three at a time, her bag bouncing against her side. She was off campus in a matter of minutes. Three blocks west of the campus she veered into a back alley and pressed a button on her bracelet. Halfway down the alley a shed door opened automatically, revealing her workshop. Lights flickered on, illuminating a workbench piled with half-completed gadgets and half-dismantled electronics that took up one entire wall of the shed; a mini forge sat in the far corner. Her Iron Maiden suit, graphite-gray with cherry-red highlights on the shoulders, abdomen, knees, and elbows, filled the entire center of the room. Wires connected it to a computer CPU mounted on the wall opposite the workbench, below a monitor that woke up automatically and displayed a row of green indicators.

Bri pressed another button on her bracelet, opening the back of the suit fully just as she entered the shed. She tossed her bag on the workbench and slipped into the suit, ducking to fit her head into the helmet. Her bracelets connected to ports in the suit’s gauntlets and automatically activated the program to close the back hatch. The helmet came to life, her HUD showing the suit’s status, power level, and fuel level for the new jetpack, as well as the emergency alert. With a flick of her eyes she ran a quick diagnostic before pulling the wires connecting the suit to the computer out of their ports and racing out of the workshop. The program to close the door activated the moment she was outside, turning off the lights simultaneously. She jumped and slapped the control on her wrist, and her jetpack activated, launching her straight up into the air, over the tops of the buildings.

The city streets flew past below her, the HUD superimposing street names and traffic patterns as she flew. A blinking red dot appeared on Upper Thames Street near Southwark Bridge, and she veered toward it. Pedestrians looked up in surprise as she passed overhead; a little boy pointed up at her, his mouth hanging open. Iron Maiden shot past them all.

As she approached the location, her suit’s audio sensors picked up the creak and groan of metal clashing against metal, the discharge of energy weapons. A loud boom thundered out, and smoke billowed from a spot near the Thames. In gaining height to fly over the last row of buildings, she finally caught sight of the disturbance.

Mecha-Man stood in the middle of the street in front of an armored truck whose front wheels he was holding off the ground by the bumper. Two men stood on the driver’s side, aiming energy pistols at the driver through the armored door, black splotches on the doors indicating where they had shot it already. Behind Mecha-Man a car rocked gently on its roof in a growing puddle of petrol. Iron Maiden shifted herself upright and pointed her feet at the ground just behind Mecha-Man. The two goons didn’t seem to have noticed her; the sounds of Mecha-Man’s suit adjusting and the armored truck’s bumper collapsing in were loud enough to drown out the sound of her jetpack, even at such close range.

Three meters from the ground, Iron Maiden clasped her hands and killed the jetpack, bringing her joined fists slamming down on Mecha-Man’s helmet. Mecha-Man’s head rang as she landed in a crouch behind him, kicking him in the back of one knee. His leg bent forward suddenly, and the armored car shifted to one side in his grip. One of his helpers jumped back, yelping in shock, and turned around to search wildly for the source of the disturbance. Iron Maiden kicked Mecha-Man’s other knee, but he locked his leg straight and it didn’t bend. With a groan he knocked the armored truck over onto its passenger side, and the back door jarred open.

Mecha-Man pushed himself up and turned to face Iron Maiden as his two helpers came around to join him, leveling their pistols at her. Iron Maiden swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat. When she had started building the suit over the summer, she had done it purely to prove that she _could_ ; she hadn’t expected to really use it – and certainly not when she had only really finished it yesterday! “You know, I thought after the other day you would’ve had enough, Mecha-Meathead,” she taunted, folding her arms and affecting more confidence than she felt.

Mecha-Man took one look at her and scoffed. “What?” he asked. “That little scrape? Please; I’ve cut myself worse _shaving_!”

“What do you shave with? A buffer?” Iron Maiden kept her focus on Mecha-Man, even as her suit tracked the two goons moving to her left to flank her. She slowly shifted her stance to keep all of them in front of herself, finally moving her helmet to either side to watch when the goons were completely on the opposite side of her from Mecha-Man.

As she turned her head a little too far to follow the goons, Mecha-Man leapt forward, jumping into the air and bringing his fist down on Iron Maiden’s head. She, however, dove forward and surged to her feet behind him. The goons scattered as Mecha-Man nearly ran into them. She kicked one leg back into Mecha-Man’s leg, the clangor echoing off the buildings around them. One of the goons got off a shot at Iron Maiden, but it missed and scored a gouge out of the brick storefront behind her. She charged Mecha-Man, diving into his chest and activating her jetpack, slamming him to the ground, cutting a deep gouge across the street. She skidded off of Mecha-Man and landed on her back, groaning. From several meters away twin energy blasts lanced out at her–

–only for a spinning dog leash to deflect the energy beams aside and into the roof of the armored truck.

“Come now,” the Hound chided, clucking his tongue. “Not very sporting to shoot a man when he’s down, don’t you think? And three against one?” He lashed out his leash, wrapped it around the chest of one thug, and dragged him back, holding out an arm and clotheslining the man as he passed. “Let’s even the odds a bit, shall we?”

Iron Maiden brought her legs below her chest and pushed herself up from the ground, keeping one of her arm cannons trained on Mecha-Man as he found his footing again as well, one of his cannons pointed at her head. “You again!” She groaned. “I don’t remember inviting you to this party, Canine!”

The Hound wrapped his leash around Mecha-Man’s arm and tugged, pulling his aim off. “That’s the thanks I get when I just saved your sorry arse?” He scoffed and released the arm. “Maybe I should’ve just watched!”

“Well _I_ didn’t invite _either_ of you to my retirement party!” retorted Mecha-Man, his arm cannons whirring to life and pointing at both of them. “But you’re _both_ uninvited as of now!” Twin bursts of energy shot out at Iron Maiden and the Hound. The Hound spun his leash as a shield, but was pushed back by the force all the same. Iron Maiden dove behind a parked car, but not quickly enough to avoid the blast entirely. She winced on feeling the heat course over her arm as the metal, thin as it was in that section, warped and melted. Mecha-Man turned his cannon on her position, the energy melting slowly through the car’s engine block.

Iron Maiden glanced under the car past Mecha-Man and caught sight of a trash bin on the far side of the street. Grinning to herself she jumped to her feet. “Hey, Mecha-Dumb!” She shot her grappling hook past his head and into the bin, the hooks extending between two of its slats. “Catch!” she shouted, ripping the bin out of the ground and retracting her grappling hook, bringing the bin caroming toward her. Mecha-Man shot at her and she shifted position, but not fast enough to entirely avoid the energy bolt. She hissed in pain, involuntarily reaching her free hand up to rub her shoulder where he had hit her and melted through the outermost layer of armor, even as the bin bounced into Mecha-Man’s legs. He stumbled backward, and the energy beams cut off at once.

As Iron Maiden leapt over the car, fists raised above her head, the Hound spun around and looped his leash around the one goon still standing. The man dropped to the ground just before the leash could tighten around him, and he rolled under a car, away from the Hound. Iron Maiden came down in front of Mecha-Man and slammed her fists into his chest as hard as she could, eliciting no more than a hollow thud. Mecha-Man slammed his helmet into hers with a clang, knocking her backward a pace. Inside her suit, Iron Maiden blinked hard against the ringing in her ears. Mecha-Man raised both his arm cannons at her and opened up, pumping energy plasma at her. Iron Maiden raised her arms to shield herself, knowing it wasn’t enough, only to be slammed to the ground.

“Aaaaah!” The Hound landed on top of her, a quiet whimper escaping his lips. Iron Maiden pushed him off of her and rolled into a kneeling position, just in time to watch Mecha-Man set the armored truck back onto its wheels. The goon still standing crawled inside the truck and drove away across the bridge, bags of money spilling out the open back door as the truck bounced along the pavement. Mecha-Man followed after him with the other goon slung over one shoulder.

Iron Maiden sighted down her arm to line up a shot on the truck – even just to blow out the tires – but it disappeared into the traffic before she could fire. She groaned in frustration and slammed her fist into the pavement, leaving behind a dent. Then she looked down at the Hound, who was still lying where he had fallen, his eyes closed, cradling his side. He let out a low moan, and Iron Maiden groaned.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s nothing overly explicit, but this chapter does _almost_ earn the “Teen” rating I give to all my stories. Let’s just say that Felix has a mouth…

The Hound’s first conscious thought on waking up was that he was being carried – something that hadn’t happened since he was a baby. And yet the arms holding him were hard and cold against his shoulders and legs. There was tightness in his chest, matched by the burning heat in his side. He tried to suck in a deep breath, but only coughed weakly.

“You son of a bitch,” an unfamiliar voice muttered above him, a distinctly feminine lilt to it.

“I think my mother would disagree with that assessment.” The Hound forced his eyes open and found himself staring up into a fair-skinned face with hazel eyes and ringed with bright blue hair – what of the face he could see with the metal helmet only partially pulled open. The girl – probably not much older than him – looked down at him, her eyes narrowed in a mix of surprise, concern, and anger. Her lips were set in a thin line, her cheeks taking on a slight rosy tint. Vaguely he noticed her gaze drifting to his side where the energy blasts had caught him. He blinked in surprise. “You know, last night I really wanted to rip that suit off of you,” he coughed, his eyes taking in the startled look on her face as her eyes darted back up to his face.

She arched an eyebrow dubiously. “Oh, yeah? So what about now?”

He smirked. “Well, I still want to rip it off of you,” he replied, “but for a different reason.” He wagged his eyebrows. “Tell me, do you have matching carpet?”

She scoffed and rolled her eyes in annoyance. “I didn’t _have_ to pick you up just now, Mutt,” she retorted. “I could have just left you lying in the middle of the street, see what you look like as road kill.”

The Hound raised an eyebrow. “My, my, aren’t we forward, darling! _You_ ’re picking _me_ up? Normally I have to go to a club before beautiful women try to pick me up!”

She gave him an unimpressed look before jerking her head off to the side. “Any more of that and I’ll throw you in the Thames and let you test out your doggie paddle!”

He snorted, forcing back a wince at the twinge of pain that shot down his side. “And here I thought _I_ was the one offering to get _you_ wet!”

She let out a disgusted groan and threw the Hound into the air and out over the water. He yelled, scrabbling for anything within reach as he sailed over the railing and the Thames rushed up to meet him. Somewhere in the fight – when he’d lunged to knock the suit-woman away from the energy blast, he thought – he had lost hold of his leash. He closed his eyes an instant before he struck the water–

The sharp tug on his ankle came completely out of nowhere. The wind whipped through his hair, blowing his miraculous ears back flat against his head as the top of his head dipped into the water, and he opened his eyes to see the underside of the Southwark Bridge sailing past. A grappling hook had latched around his ankle. He covered his face with his arms as he swung back under the bridge, his whole head skimming through the water. He yelled in surprise when his sopping wet head emerged from the river and the grappling hook line reeled him back and swung him up and over the bridge. Finally the rope wrapped twice around a streetlight crossbar, leaving him dangling upside down, face to face with the irate woman in the suit, his miraculous ears hanging uselessly off the top of his head and water dripping from his hair. The woman scowled at him, eyes narrowed and brows knit together, her face mere centimeters from his own.

“You’re a cad, you know that, Mutt?” she growled. “What right do you have to call yourself a hero?”

“That’s scant thanks for a man who risked life and limb to save you, Iron Britches!” he retorted, trying and failing to push his miraculous ears and hair back in place so they wouldn’t dangle uselessly. Instead, all he managed was to slop water onto his back.

“It’s ‘Iron _Maiden_ ,’” she corrected him, poking him in the chest.

“And quite the ‘maiden’ you are,” he agreed, wincing as his injured side stretched and pulled with the force of gravity. She’d caught his ankle on the same side that had taken the energy blast, and he couldn’t lift the arm right against the gravity to stop the muscles from stretching and screaming in protest. Both his arms dangled uselessly, a meter off the ground.

“Oh, so all I am to you is a _woman_?” she demanded, shoving him hard in the chest so he swung like a pendulum. “Is that some kind of misogynistic ‘only men can be superheroes’ bullshit?”

The Hound scoffed. “If I thought only men could be heroes, I’d be in the wrong line of work here, sweetheart. I’ve seen Ladybug in action, up close – she nearly gave me a one-way ticket back to jolly old England once in fact –”

“Why am I not surprised?” Iron Maiden muttered, shaking her head.

“–and I’m pretty sure Sent-Bee would kick my ass from one side of the country to the other if I said she wasn’t a real hero – miraculous or not,” the Hound finished.

She raised an eyebrow at him dubiously. “Wait, are you saying that you actually _know_ the Heroes of Paris?”

“I _should_ … I’m sort of one of them,” he replied, gesturing to the dog ears and raising an eyebrow. He leaned forward to look up at his trapped ankle before fixing his eyes on her face pointedly. Iron Maiden grumbled and released him, allowing him to fall gracelessly to the ground. He landed hard on his back and pushed himself up into a sitting position before running a hand through his wet hair to make it lay flat. “Finally.”

“You really don’t strike me as the ‘Heroes of Paris’ type,” she observed, folding her arms and staring down at him, observing him suspiciously through narrowed eyes. “They’re a lot more… um… _heroic_ …”

He scoffed dismissively. “What, are you a fan? I would remember if they had a mech-suit hero of their own.”

“I’ve seen them around town,” she acknowledged, nodding. “Cat Noir saved a bus I was on once, a few years ago. Our school trip was attacked by the Tramp, and we would have gone off the bridge and straight into the Seine had it not been for him.”

“French?” he asked, surprised. When she nodded slowly, he rose to his feet, took her hand, and bowed, bringing her gauntleted knuckles to his lips. “Enchantée, Mademoiselle,” he purred. “Tes yeux brillent comme les étoiles dans les cieux.” [“Your eyes shine like the stars in the heavens.”]

She gave him a deadpan look and pulled her hand away. “That’s enough, Romeo,” she growled. “Because that’s _all_ French girls want, right?”

“Well…” He grinned and wagged his eyebrows at her, but froze on seeing her gauntlet raised to slap him and the icy expression on her face. He cleared his throat awkwardly and took a step back out of easy slapping range. “Um… what answer _won’t_ get me thrown in the river again?”

“With _your_ track record, Mutt?” she asked drily. “Nothing. I’d try saying _nothing_ right now!”

He coughed. “Then I will merely say that it was a pleasure to be fighting _with_ you today, instead of _fighting_ with you… Iron Maiden.”

She nodded grudgingly. “And in that case I am… grateful… to you for taking that energy blast for me. Even if I didn’t really need or want you doing it.”

He held out a hand. “Perhaps we will fight together again some time?”

“Perhaps,” she agreed, eyeing his hand but making no move to shake it. “Mecha-Man is still out there, after all.”

“As is the Ripper,” the Hound added with a frown.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Felix arrived back at his Bentley, parked outside the police station closest to his fight with the Ripper the other night. He gave the station a halfhearted glare before easing the car door open and collapsing into the seat. He had come down this morning for information on the Stripper Ripper investigation, but the inspector had been mum. All the man would tell him was that they were pursuing some leads, but that he would not comment on an active criminal investigation. When Felix had pressed for details as a concerned citizen, the inspector had politely sent him on his way. He glared at the dashboard. Although he couldn’t be certain, he suspected that the Heroes of Paris didn’t have this much trouble getting information out of _their_ police. His phone screen lit up to show a missed text from his mother, but he left it sitting where it was.

Barkk emerged from her spot in his jacket pocket and pressed her paws to his side, whining pitifully. “Oh, this must be so painful!” she squeaked, rubbing gently.

Felix sighed and closed his eyes. “It’s certainly no walk in the park,” he grumbled. “I thought the suit was supposed to protect me.”

“It did,” the Kwami replied, her tail thumping anxiously against his arm. “If you hadn’t been transformed, this would have been so much worse! Unfortunately, while your suit cannot be pierced except by miraculous weapons, the impact and heat will still be transferred. One time the Hound got shot three times in the chest and was out of action for two weeks to recover from the broken ribs! This time your suit absorbed some of the heat, but it couldn’t absorb all of it – the fire power-up would give you better protection from heat, though!”

“Perhaps that’s something to ask Tante Emilie about next time I see her.” Felix groaned. “So what happens now?”

Barkk sighed sadly. “You need to rest as best you can. Since you have a miraculous you will heal a little faster than normal, but you do need to take it easy for a day or two until this burn can heal.”

Felix scoffed and winced, rubbing his side. “Not much chance of that!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Tramp is not an Akuma who appeared in the show; he appeared in [Alya](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25865851/chapters/62877208) and [Ivan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25865851/chapters/62900185)'s recollections of the final Hawk Moth battle in “A Bittersweet Anniversary.”


	10. Chapter 10

“Did you see that?” The warehouse door slammed shut, almost falling off its hinges, to emphasize the question.

Antoine tossed the circuit board he just covered in solder beads across the warehouse in annoyance. Three hours of work… He spun around in his swivel chair and fixed his eyes on Mecha-Man, who clomped across the warehouse space, past the crumpled and dented armored truck, and finally stopped next to the workbench. Antoine selected a pair of pliers from the bench and started working the stripped screws out of the chest piece, even as Gaston pulled off his silver helmet and carefully placed it on the bench before swinging his legs up and fumbling with the clasps.

“I did,” Antoine confirmed tersely, flicking a bent bolt across the room so it clanged off the side of their delivery truck. “That other suit was there, and so was the Miracu-Mutt.”

“The other suit flew.”

Antoine removed the first section of the old chest piece entirely from the frame and nodded, dropping it on the ground and pushing it under the bench with his foot. “A working jetpack is an impressive piece of tech,” he acknowledged idly, his focus on the stripped screw in front of him. “Whoever built that suit knows what they’re doing.” The jetpack he had designed for Mecha-Man had taken months of trial and error just to find the right power ratio to get the suit of the ground without burning through the entire fuel reserve, and he had only finished the design after studying the propulsion system on an alien pod closely for inspiration. Unfortunately, the parts to build it were not easily available and had taken most of the summer to acquire through Lynchpin’s various contacts. Several smuggled shipments had been captured by the Heroes of Paris, and a handful of the pieces they _had_ gathered had gone missing from his lab in Paris over the summer, probably lost in the Heroes’ first raid when he’d been forced to relocate to the backup lab in Lynchpin’s headquarters building.

“So when will _I_ be able to fly?” Gaston demanded, shrugging his way out of the rest of the suit, leaving the legs and chest frame standing upright next to the workbench. He leaned against it and looked down at Antoine with a frown.

Antoine scoffed. “Do you have any idea how expensive the parts are for that, considering how much alien tech goes into my design?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Even if we _had_ gotten the full haul from this job, we would only _just_ be able to afford all the components! And that would not leave any money left over to pay for anything else.”

“What do you mean, ‘if’ we’d gotten the haul?” asked Gaston, eyes narrowing suspiciously. He turned to scrutinize the armored truck and let out a low curse on catching sight of the rear door hanging off the hinge. “Don’t tell me…” he groaned.

“You were a little too enthusiastic when you knocked the truck over,” Antoine explained sourly. “A lot of the coins fell out on the way here. We probably ended up with about half.”

“And how much is that?”

“Half-mil. Probably a little less.” Antoine examined the chest piece and tossed it into the corner, followed by the arm pieces. “After giving the guys their cut – plus a little extra for last time – we still ended up with enough to replace the suit’s chest plate and make some basic upgrades, with a few grand left over to put in the new rocket launchers.”

Gaston glared at the figures Antoine had scribbled on the suit blueprints laid out on the bench. “Every goddamn time…” he muttered, slamming his fist on the bench.

“We should have enough left over after making those upgrades to at least send _something_ home for our families,” Antoine consoled him.

“We’d better,” Gaston grumbled. “Colette is getting worried since the rent is coming due and Lynchpin hasn’t paid in over a month.”

Antoine put a hand on his shoulder. “Your family won’t be out on the street,” he promised. “If it’s that bad, we could hold off on the new launchers for now.”

“No, the rent’s only a grand, and Colette got a job at that flower shop by Notre Dame to bring in a little extra income,” Gaston told him, shaking his head. “It means Richard has to spend the afternoons with his Nana, but I think he’s happy enough with that.” He chuckled. “I’m pretty sure it’s been harder on Colette.”

Antoine hummed. “I know Adine was disappointed when she had to go back to work,” he commented. “The worst for her was not being home when Bridgette got out of school.” He sighed. “We’ll have more than that to send back,” he promised, consulting a spreadsheet on his tablet before sending an email to an anonymous address.

“That’s good.” Gaston fingered one of the arm pieces where the metal had melted through, exposing the heat-resistant fabric beneath. “Richard’s birthday is coming up and we need to get him a present.”

“Know what you’re getting?”

“He really wants one of those new PlayBox video game consoles and the latest edition of the Super Akuma Battle Melee game,” answered Gaston.

Antoine let out a snort. “I assume I’m not the only one who sees the irony in that?”

Gaston grinned and shook his head ruefully. “I’m just glad they haven’t included _us_ as a playable character yet, considering they’ve added all the heroes now!”

“Mecha-Man isn’t an ‘Akuma’,” Antoine pointed out, not taking his eyes off the schematic on the tablet. “Doesn’t fit the branding.”

“I’m sure the next upgrade will have a ‘Lynchpin-ion Extension,’” Gaston grumbled. “Did you know that’s what the Ladyblog is calling us now? ‘Lynchpin-ions’? We sound like feathers.”

Antoine shrugged and pulled open the first of the three crates that had been waiting for him when he returned from the heist, revealing sheet upon sheet of light brown alien heat shielding material, tightly packed together. “There are worse things they could call us.”

Gaston looked over his shoulder and started. “Where did that come from?”

“My contact dropped it off while we were out,” explained Antoine. “He had a shipment from Africa he was trying to offload cheap, and he agreed to let me put it on credit against this job succeeding.” He carefully extracted a sheet of the thin brownish metal and held it up to the light, feeling the weight. “I think there’s enough here for a double layer on the chest and some left over for the legs, though not enough to cover the leg pieces entirely.”

Gaston hummed and pushed the discarded armor plates into a pile. They were quiet for a moment, Antoine stacking the heat shielding sheets and cataloging how many each piece of the suit would require while Gaston collected the scrap metal into a heap on the far side of the warehouse. “Richard will be ten next month,” he finally observed.

“Hopefully we will be back in Paris in time for his birthday,” replied Antoine. “One more successful job here and we’ll have the suit entirely replaced and have enough to live comfortable for a year or two – even without Lynchpin. And I may have just the thing: a jeweler on the east side of the city received an enormous bequest for appraisal this week. If we can clear that out, it will be more than enough for our purposes.”

“Good,” Gaston replied. “Because I’m sick of fighting against these stupid heroes! Half the point of leaving Paris was to get _away_ from having to deal with heroes all the time, but it’s like they followed us here. That other suit can almost match up against me now, and that’s _without_ factoring in his pet. Without our anti-miraculous weapon load-out I just can’t overpower that Mangy Mutt. So the two of them together…”

Antoine hummed thoughtfully, furrowing his brows in concentration. Over the summer, the only reason they had succeeded in repulsing the Heroes of Paris so many times had been the anti-miraculous weaponry he had developed. But without a source of chi-putty as ammunition, they didn’t have anything in their arsenal that could really counter a miraculous hero. Unless… “If we can’t rely on anti-miraculous _hardware_ ,” Antoine mused slowly, “perhaps we need to develop some ‘anti-miraculous _software_.’”

Gaston gave him a dubious look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means we need to find a way to turn our opponents’ altruism around so it benefits _us_ ,” he replied, hardly believing what he was considering. He made a distasteful face. “We need to use their goodness to our advantage.” He grabbed a piece of loose paper and started sketching out a rough design. Deploying it effectively would require using the drone, however, and the weight restrictions would be a major concern… But if he forwent half the money he planned to send home to Adine, he could buy a second, larger drone capable of carrying a sufficient payload for their purposes. As he drew what he had in mind and estimated the prices for the components, he frowned in disgust. In spite of everything, this was taking it to a greater extreme than he had ever gone before. Would he ever be able to look himself in the mirror again if something went wrong? And with his own daughter attending university nearby? But if this succeeded, they would never have to contemplate something like this again. And after everything that had happened…

Gaston looked over his shoulder at the drawing and his jaw dropped. He stared at Antoine in surprise. “Are–are you sure, boss?”

Antoine nodded, sighing heavily. “We need a failsafe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The references in here are to [“The Battle for the Seine”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26066554/chapters/63396316) (especially ["Counterdiction" Chapter 1](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26066554/chapters/63894613)), when the Heroes of Paris were preventing Lynchpin’s drug shipments from reaching Paris, some of which included components of alien technology.


	11. Chapter 11

Bri peeled the damaged paneling off her suit and tossed it to the far side of the workshop in disgust. The components that went into that arm piece had cost her a week of wages to buy, and her tuition bill was coming due at the end of the month. She couldn’t afford to keep replacing damaged pieces of her armor, especially when Mecha-Man was out there and would just damage more of it. And she didn’t have the time, money, or materials to replace it _now_. With a sigh she crossed the workshop and retrieved the panel, fingering the scorch mark that Mecha-Man’s cannon had left. It hadn’t melted all the way through, but it had come close. Turning it over in her hands she sighed. “Maybe I can get a little more life out of it,” she muttered, grasping it with a pair of tongs and holding it over her mini forge until the metal was hot enough to manipulate. She gave it a couple sharp raps with a hammer to smooth out the scoring and plunged it into a bucket of water. A couple bolts and it was back on the suit. She made a note on her tablet to replace it when she had a chance.

She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, ran her fingers through her hair to pull it away where it had gotten plastered to her scalp, and stretched her neck before pushing her back out to straighten it. One of the workshop windows was cracked slightly open, just enough for a soft breeze to pass through and keep it from becoming too stuffy and overheated while her mini-forge was on. Outside, children who had just gotten out of school were playing football in the alley; the sound of their laughter was almost drowned out by the music pumping through her stereo system at full blast to mask the noises of her workshop. She sighed wistfully. Growing up she had played outside a lot – her friends had loved playing under the Eiffel Tower, racing from one leg to the other or playing football on the Champs de Mars. And yet, even more than playing outside with friends, her favorite pastime had always been working on electronics with her father. She had been three when they built their first transistor radio together. Thanks to him, she could wire a circuit board with her eyes closed before she could ride a bicycle. When she wanted her own computer, her father had dropped a box of parts on the kitchen table and challenged her to build her own. Less than a week later, she’d installed the last chip and booted it up. When she had thought about her future growing up, she only ever wanted to become an engineer like him. She had been all set to attend PSL… and then the spring had happened.

As she reattached the repaired panel to her suit she swallowed against the lump in her throat that had been there for months. Why did he have to choose _now_ to come to London?

_“Honey it’s getting close to midnight”…_

Bridgette scoffed and picked up the tablet which was running a test on the suit’s operating system. A quick glance showed a slight discrepancy in the jetpack’s thrust control and vectoring. She walked around the suit slowly, a finger on her chin, and hummed quietly as she inspected the jetpack’s casing: three of the mountings had come loose. Selecting the correct wrench, she set to work reseating them. She had only finished the first one when the song paused and the police-band radio sitting on top of the stereo crackled.

“Be advised, armed robbery in progress. The Victoria on Edgeware. Armed officers already en route.”

Bridgette stared at the radio, her brows furrowed suspiciously. There was no reason to suspect it, but… She quickly tightened the remaining two mountings on her jetpack, her eyes drifting to her bracelet every few seconds. No sooner was the last mounting secure than her bracelet activated. She pressed a button on the bracelet screen, and the bug’s feed began. She could just make out the interior of a warehouse. A metal leg appeared in the feed, and a voice said, “Everything’s ready. The cops and heroes should be busy for a while.”

“As if on cue…” Bri muttered, disconnecting her tablet from the suit and pressing a button on her bracelet.

* * *

Five minutes later, Iron Maiden dropped to the ground near King William Street to find Mecha-Man just stepping out of a jewelry store, several bags slung over one arm. A delivery truck idling on the street revved its engine and backed up to Mecha-Man the moment Iron Maiden landed.

“Oh, come on!” Mecha-Man bellowed in frustration. “Why can’t I catch a break from you hero types?”

“You want to catch a _break_ from me?” Iron Maiden demanded. She jumped into the air, gave another burst on her jetpack, and hit him in the chest with simultaneous energy blasts from both her arm cannons, pushing him stumbling back. “Stop _breaking_ the law!”

The energy coursed over Mecha-Man’s suit and dissipated into the pavement around his feet. He threw the bags of jewels – smoking and browned from the energy that had coursed over his suit – into the truck’s open back door. The truck sprang forward as Mecha-Man whipped his arm up and shot an energy pulse at Iron Maiden. She killed her jetpack and plummeted to the ground to avoid the blast, landing directly in front of the truck, bracing her legs, and throwing her shoulder forward. The truck slammed headlong into her, the entire front collapsing in on itself around her even as she was pushed backward, leaving two long skid marks in the pavement. The truck’s driver, barely visible through the windshield, punched the steering wheel in frustration.

“Nice try!” she taunted, pushing the truck away from herself and stepping around it to find Mecha-Man standing in front of her. “But you missed!”

“Enjoy it while you can, hero!” shouted Mecha-Man. “You won’t be so lucky every time.” With that he sprang forward, fist cocked back and already punching forward, aiming for her head.

Iron Maiden ducked under his punch as the pile driver activated, but he jerked his knee up into her chest. The clank reverberated through her suit, knocking her teeth chattering. As he went to knee her again, she grabbed his leg and pulled him off the ground, lifting him into the air, spinning him partly around, and slamming him into the ground on his back, hard. Mecha-Man let out a grunt, aimed one of his cannons at her head, and fired. Iron Maiden ducked the energy beam, pushed the cannon away so the pulse shot directly up into the sky, and retreated a step. Mecha-Man pushed himself to his feet and lunged at her. Iron Maiden tried to avoid him, but he caught her around the waist with one arm, lifting her bodily into the air. She brought her elbow down on his back repeatedly, but without effect. He slammed her down onto the ground flat on her back, knocking her head against the back of her helmet. Lights flashed in her eyes. Mecha-Man crouched over her and pinned her to the pavement with his knee on her chest plate. The metal whined in protest as he leaned his full weight into it. Her chest plate began to cave in, constricting her breathing. He raised both fists above his head, and she quickly shot out one of her grappling hooks, latching it around the streetlight on the opposite side of the street and pulling it out of the ground to fall on top of her. Mecha-Man let out a primal roar and extended higher–

–just as the streetlight smashed into his clenched hands. He howled in pain, shaking his head and groaning as the streetlight clanged onto his helmet with a hollow ring. Mecha-Man grabbed the fallen pole in his hands and held it above his head as a spike to stab her. She lifted her arms to protect her face.

Before he could bring it down, however, a brown dog leash whistled through the air and wrapped around the pole, wrenching it out of Mecha-Man’s grip. “Striking the lady when she’s down?” chided the Hound, shaking his head and clucking his tongue. He caught the pole in one hand and casually tossed it aside. “Not very sporting of you, is it?”

Iron Maiden pushed the surprised Mecha-Man off of herself and rose to her feet, smiling with relief inside her helmet in spite of herself. “I never thought I would say this in my _life_ , but it’s actually good to see you, Hound!” She frowned. “But what are you doing here in the first place?”

He shrugged, eyes focusing on Mecha-Man in a predatory manner. “I was in the area when I heard the 10-43,” he explained. A low-pitched growl emanated from his chest. “There was a _spot_ of trouble up north, but the cops have those knuckleheads in _chains_ – they should be in a _kennel_ in a flash! So no problems on that end.” He wore a feral grin. “Now there’s nothing to keep me from helping the _Fer_ Maiden with her mechanical problem!”

Iron Maiden smiled in relief – though neither of the others could see it – and cocked her fists back in a fighting stance. “What are you gonna do now, huh?” she demanded of Mecha-Man.

Mecha-Man let out a guttural roar and unleashed energy blasts from both arm cannons at the heroes. The Hound spun his leash in a shield, blocking the energy and redirecting it into a fire hydrant on the far side of the street. Iron Maiden ducked below the energy beam and rolled behind the Hound’s shield. The energy missed her and struck the jewelry store behind her, carving a hole through the façade and roof.

“Is your aim always this bad, Mecha-Lad?” scoffed the Hound. He turned and raised an eyebrow at Iron Maiden. “Tell me yours is better, _mon Fer_.”

She smirked behind her helmet, dropped to one knee, and activated her targeting system. Mecha-Man’s suit was almost entirely light brown… but not all of it. “I’m pretty sure that’s just a guy thing, Pup,” she replied lightly, firing just below his shield. “My aim’s perfect every time!”

Mecha-Man howled as the energy beam hit his leg just below the layer of brown heat shielding. “God damn it all!” he groaned, hopping on one leg. “We didn’t want to do this, but fine: we’ll do it _your_ way, _heroes_.”

The Hound suddenly straightened up, cocked his head, and spun around wildly in all directions. Iron Maiden, confused, backed up slightly and stared at him in surprise as Mecha-Man rose to his feet to advance on them, his arm cannons aimed at the ground, away from the two heroes.

“Your pal here is hearing our failsafe,” explained Mecha-Man. He pulled something out of the compartment on the front of his suit and tossed it at her. She caught it one-handed without taking her eyes off of him. “There are about a dozen more just like that one spread throughout the city.” He held up a hand as Iron Maiden started to lunge toward him. “Now, we don’t _want_ to blow up London – considering the paltry payoff this job is going to net us in the end, it’s not exactly worth it. But we will! But only if you two _heroes_ force us to!” Iron Maiden glared at Mecha-Man, her hands clenching into tight fists. Mecha-Man made a clucking noise and shook his head from side to side. “The bombs have a timer to go off in fifteen minutes,” he announced. “Plenty of time for a couple of heroes to stop _us_ or stop _them_ … but not enough time for you to do both.” He picked up the front end of the truck and kicked it once to straighten it out slightly as the engine revved. “Good luck…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Fer” is French for “iron”. “Fer”… “fair”?


	12. Chapter 12

The Hound stared in shock at the explosive Iron Maiden was cradling in both hands like a china plate, no larger than a rugby ball. He could hear a high-pitched beeping coming from the jewelry exchange behind them, its front doors hanging askew off their hinges. By concentrating and filtering out the city noise around them, he could also hear that same beeping all around him, carrying from all directions, though some of them were faint with distance. If every one of those beeps represented another explosive…

What would that many explosions do to London?

Felix was not cut out for these stakes! Every other time he had gone out to play hero, he could just as easily have stayed home and allowed the police to take care of it. The Stripper Ripper was a dumbass with mommy issues and a little too much time on his hands. But without any special abilities, he really wasn’t a threat – or at least not to more than one or two women each night. Even if the Hound didn’t lift another finger against him, the police would bring him down on their own eventually. When he had fought Mecha-Man the last time and taken an energy blast meant for Iron Maiden, sure he’d done it because he could see the damage the energy did to her suit. But he had known from the Heroes of Paris that a miraculous suit could withstand an energy blast, even if he had underestimated just how much it would actually hurt to get hit by one – his side was still tender and red from the injury, the burn sending chills down his side, almost a day later. But this time?

This time there was no way the police could do anything about the bombs fast enough to disarm all of them. Even calling them and making them understand what was going on might take too long! And the police wouldn’t be able to locate the bombs fast enough, anyways. As far as he could tell, Iron Maiden didn’t hear the same beeping that he could hear; Mecha-Man had set this up entirely for _his_ benefit. And if _he_ didn’t do something about these bombs right the hell now, innocent people would die.

“What’s going on there, Hound?” his mother asked over the communicator, the worry clear in her voice.

Carapace had said a hero’s primary goal was to protect people. Period. But he’d failed the last time he was faced with this challenge.

Iron Maiden slammed her gauntlet on the pavement, leaving a fist-sized dent and shaking the Hound out of his reverie. She dropped down into a sprinter’s stance, her helmet pointing straight at the receding shape of Mecha-Man and his damaged delivery truck, just turning the corner three blocks down and disappearing from view behind a row of buildings. “They’re getting away!” she growled, her jetpack whining to life.

The Hound put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head, staring after Mecha-Man with a dark expression on his face. “We can’t,” he told her. “The bombs!”

She turned her helmet and nearly head butted him. “Screw the bombs!”

“Do that and we screw the _city_! If we don’t do something people will die!” he shouted, placing his hands on both her shoulders and shaking, his face centimeters from hers, staring into her eye-slit. “No one else can stop this thing! Only us! Do you want that on your conscience!?!”

She turned to look down the street where Mecha-Man had disappeared. “But – I just – _damn_ it!!” She turned back to him. She groaned. “Fine. So what do we do? I can’t track these things.”

“I can.” He made a face. “I can hear them. I’ll find them and let you know. You figure out how to stop them.”

“How will you let me know?”

The Hound opened the end of his leash handle and pulled out another earpiece. Iron Maiden opened her helmet and affixed the earpiece into one of her ears before snapping it back in place. Then he caught his leash around the streetlight and pulled himself into the air, spinning around into a flip and landing on the jewelry exchange roof. “I’ll make a circuit of the city and let you know where I hear bombs,” he told her.

“Right…” Iron Maiden said slowly, testing out the communicator. She didn’t sound convinced.

“Worried you can’t defuse these things?” he asked, angling for the river where he could hear at least one explosive. He caught his leash around a chimney and swung around it as a fulcrum, spinning himself around in a sharp turn and throwing himself out into empty space over the street.

She scoffed. “Please. I already defused this one while he was talking.” She was quiet for a moment, and the Hound heard her stomping up the stairs into the exchange building. “No,” she finally continued, “I’m a little more concerned that you won’t find them all.”

“Well, your next target is the north tower on London Bridge,” he told her. Turning south he followed the river a little further east. “Then the Tower of London,” he added, jumping out into space and landing on the balls of his feet on a telephone line connecting to the Tower Bridge

“How many are there total?” his mother asked.

“Mecha-Man said there are twelve,” the Hound replied breathlessly, running across the top of the Tower Bridge. Beeping came from the center of the covered walkway, and he dropped his leash over the side to snag the explosive. It flew back to him and he grabbed it one handed, holding it away from his chest. “I’ve got one; now what do I do with it?” he asked. Looking down at the bomb in his hand, he found a timer counting down: if it was correct, they had less than twelve minutes as he jumped from the Tower Bridge onto the closest rooftop, the package held tightly in front of himself with two hands, and turned to run straight west across the part of the city south of the river.

“Leave it by the next bomb and I’ll take care of it,” Iron Maiden instructed. Her jetpack activated in the background.

He could hear two sources of beeping to the north, closer to the river, and another one directly ahead. “The next one is on the Eye, and then there’s one on Westminster Bridge,” he reported, sprinting across the rooftops above Lambeth Road. “But I’ll leave this one at the War Museum.” Out of the corner of his eye he could see Iron Maiden hovering on her jetpack near the top of the Tower of London.

“If that’s seven, then you’re over halfway there!” his mother cheered.

“Thank you, Mother,” he grumbled, tucking the bomb and tossing his leash as far ahead as he could manage. “I can count, too, you know.”

“Wait, your _mom_ is listening to all of this?” Iron Maiden snorted. “And here I was thinking you were some tough guy… Do you need mommy to bed you down? Take you out for walks? Does she rub your ears and call you a good boy, Pup?”

“Oh, shut up,” he groaned, his leash carrying him through the air over the Museum. He tossed the bomb that was in his hands and it landed right next to the one already waiting on its roof. “Don’t make a big deal of it.”

“No, it’s – it’s nice that your _mère_ supports you,” she replied quickly. “It’s… just not what I was expecting. Not from _you_ , at least.”

“Wait, is this… are–are you _jealous_? Because I have someone to help?” Iron Maiden didn’t answer. The Hound glanced over to find her hanging by a grappling hook from one of the supports on the London Eye. Somewhere along the way she’d found a bag; she pulled something off a strut and shoved it into the bag. The Hound cleared his throat awkwardly to break the silence. “Anyways, I can hear a bunch more down by the water on the west end.” He scanned the area quickly; knowing what they looked like the bombs were easy enough to spot. “There’s one near the top of Big Ben… I see one near the middle of Lambeth Bridge… and… there! Westminster Abbey.”

“That still leaves two more,” warned his mother.

The Hound sprinted across the Westminster Bridge, scooping up that bomb as he passed. “The Westminster Bridge one will be at Big Ben,” he reported breathlessly, lobbing the bomb in a high arc that placed it right next to the other one, just above the clock face. Without breaking stride he ran down the street from the bridge toward Buckingham Palace, dropping to the ground when he reached St. James’s Park, following the high-pitched beeping. A pair of Queen’s Guard in ceremonial uniforms stood at attention on either side of the palace gate. The Hound leapt over the gate in a single bound, only to catch sight of a small unit of guards in modern dress near the palace entrance. And on the roof above the palace he could see another explosive. He landed in the middle of the courtyard, and one of the guards shouted and aimed his rifle at the Hound. “Oh, bloody hell,” he muttered, spinning his leash in a shield to deflect the hail of bullets the guards fired at him. “There’s a bomb on Buckingham,” he reported, “but the guards don’t like _me_ , so I doubt they’ll be happy to see _you_.”

“Well to be fair, _I_ didn’t exactly like you _either_ when we first met,” Iron Maiden teased. “So we’d at least have _that_ much in common!” Even without the communicator, the Hound could hear her jetpack behind him from somewhere in the vicinity of the War Museum.

“All the same, I’ll grab this one and bring it with me; spare them some bullets!” Another leap carried the Hound onto the palace roof and out of range of the guards on the ground. He tossed his leash and caught the bomb, pulling it off the roof and into his hand without slowing down. Tucking the bomb under his arm like a rugby ball, he charged across the palace roof, leapt into space, and landed on Constitution Hill at a dead sprint. The bomb under his arm jostled and almost fell, but he caught it by the tips of his fingers, holding it against his chest with both hands. A glance down showed the timer with less than five minutes to go. “Come on…” He could hear beeping coming from far away to his right and veered sharply in that direction, cutting across the park and racing down Piccadilly, nearly bumping into the startled pedestrians as he ran. “This is getting me nowhere.” The Hound coiled his legs, leapt, and he cleared the street, landing on the closest rooftop without slacking his pace, putting on another burst of speed as he went. The London cityscape whipped past him in a blur as he rushed toward the last bomb. “It’s at the British Museum,” he gasped, landing on the roof and panting, placing the bomb in his hands next to the one on the museum roof and dropping to his hands and knees in front of them, taking in great gulps of air.

Looking back where he had come from, he could just see a speck of red and grey lifting off from a spot near Westminster. It rose into the air, turned toward the south and spun around in a ballistic arc toward the abbey.

“ _Merde_ ,” Iron Maiden cursed. “There’s another bomb,” she announced. “Trafalgar, on top of the Column. My suit finally picked up on a signature after scanning _all_ of these. But I still have another two here before I can handle that one.”

The Hound checked the display on the bombs. “There’s only two minutes left,” he warned. “Can you disarm all five in that time?”

“No; I’ll be pushing it to get to Trafalgar as it is.”

“What if I throw them in the water or the air or something?”

“No.” Iron Maiden let out a frustrated sigh. “That won’t work; with how much C4 he used in each one, the shockwave from two of them together would still do a ton of damage.”

The Hound groaned. “I don’t get paid enough for this,” he grumbled. Louder he said, “Fine. Walk me through disarming it.”

“Right. It’s actually really easy,” she replied, speaking briskly. “If you look at the device itself, there are fourteen different wires connecting the components of the bomb together. But don’t touch any of them. The only important wire for the first step is the pink one hidden behind the other ones that looks like it connects the timer back to itself: that’s the failsafe. Pull out the end closest to the left when the timer is right-side up facing you. Then disconnect the blue wire connecting the timer to the detonator and pull out the primer cap. At that point it’s just a paperweight you really don’t want to leave out on your desk.”

The Hound blinked twice. “If you say that’s easy…” He quickly found the wires in question and disconnected them on one bomb. The timer on the bomb blinked out. The second bomb followed in short order, stopping with 30 seconds left. He let out a sigh of relief, expelling a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, picked up the now-inert bombs, and carefully made his way off the museum roof before jogging down the streets south toward the metallic glint he could still see hovering above Trafalgar Square. His hands felt clammy inside his miraculous gloves; when had he started sweating? With a groan he collapsed in front of the fountain, hardly noticing when Iron Maiden drifted down, killed her jetpack, and settled on the steps next to him.

A metal hand settled on top of his head and massaged his scalp right behind his miraculous ears. Her helmet opened with a hiss. “You’re a good boy, Pup.”


	13. Chapter 13

Iron Maiden sagged into the steps below Nelson’s Column with a groan, her hand dropping limply to her side. The power on her suit was below 15%, and between the fighting and running around to defuse the bombs, after so many sustained flights her jetpack was almost running on fumes – at this point she would probably have to walk back to her workshop. She could feel the sweat beading along her forehead and running down her cheeks and neck before soaking into her shirt, leaving her skin clammy. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and cheeks – sweat dripped down the back of her neck where her hair touched it. The gentle breeze her partly-open helmet allowed did little to cool or dry her sweaty face. Clearly her helmet needed a built-in sweatband. They had gotten all the bombs just in time, but still it felt like a hollow victory. How could she have let Mecha-Man escape _again_? “I–I can’t believe he would do that…” she whispered, staring down at her hands.

The Hound leaned heavily against her side, his head on her shoulder, gasping for breath, and dropped the last two bombs in her lap from limp hands. She looked down at them in disgust before placing them with the others she had collected in a bag she’d snagged along the way. “You know, _cher_ ,” the Hound slurred weakly, “The Heroes of Paris always work as a team.”

“So I’ve heard. That why you have your mother with you?” she teased, rubbing at her face with a gauntleted hand once before glaring at it and giving up.

He gave her a nonplussed look before fishing a handkerchief out of a pouch on his belt and handing it to her. “She’s not exactly _with_ me… and that’s not what I had in mind.”

She nodded her thanks and dabbed at her sweaty forehead, peeling the damp hair away from her skin. “Believe me, I know _exactly_ what you’ve had in mind this whole time,” she observed wryly, arching an eyebrow at him. “You haven’t exactly been _subtle_ since I opened my helmet…”

“That’s not–I–” He coughed into his hand, failing to hide the slight redness in his cheeks as he did so. “Would you be interested in a partnership?” She scoffed. “Not–not like that. Certainly nothing like that. Just as teammates. Teammates who work together to protect the city when they need to. Nothing more than that.”

She hummed coyly. “I’ll think about it.” Her arm burned where she’d been hit by an energy beam; twisting her arm she could see where the armor plating had melted in patches. Her chest was in a similar state. “Damn.” The Hound gave her a curious look. “That partnership thing might not work out after all. Half my suit needs replacing already,” she explained. “But it’s not cheap and it’s not easy.”

“I have friends who can help with that, _mon Fer_ ,” the Hound offered, giving her a look.

She scoffed. “I don’t think you understand what we’re talking about here. We’re not talking parts you can pick up from the hardware store. Mecha-Man’s energy cannons put out too much heat energy for most metals to withstand; the only reason he can take an energy blast like that is because his armor incorporates a layer of alien heat shielding, and I don’t have access to any of that!”

He smirked. “When I say I have ‘friends’ who can help you with that, I mean the Heroes of Paris literally have stacks of those heat shielding plates that you were talking about lying around their headquarters.”

“Seriously?”

“Seen it with my own eyes,” he confirmed with a nod. He frowned. “But if you’re accepting my help with this, then that makes us partners, okay?” Iron Maiden shrugged. “And if we’re going to be partners, we need to know we can trust each other, right?”

Iron Maiden narrowed her eyes at him, jerking her head down and closing her helmet with a snap. “What are you getting at?”

He grimaced, running a hand through his own sweat-plastered hair and pulling it away from his scalp. “It’s just… a lot of things don’t really make sense after all of this. How do you know so much about the Mecha-Man armor? How did you know where Mecha-Man was going to be _every time_ , even before the cops showed up? Before it had even been _reported_ a couple of times? And how did you figure out how to defuse his bombs on the first try?”

Her breath hitched. “I just did, okay, Doggo?” she answered, her voice sounding unusually high-pitched in her ears. “Don’t read too much into it. Please don’t push this…”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Maiden, but that’s not good enough. If we’re going to be working together now, I _need_ to be able to trust you, and that means knowing you’re not with Mecha-Man.”

She scoffed and threw her arms out, nearly smacking him. “ _Excuse_ me? _If_ we’re going to be working together? I’m sorry, but if I wasn’t here what was your plan for dealing with those bombs? Chuck ‘em at the Thames and hope they don’t land in a neighborhood or on a boat? Were you just going to let him throw you around the other night?” She poked him in the chest. “You need me! Don’t tell me you’re going back on your offer already!”

He shrugged. “If we can’t trust each other, then maybe it’s not going to work out.”

“I’m on your side, Hound,” she insisted, opening her helmet once more and glaring at him.

“Then how do you know so much about Mecha-Man?” he retorted, giving her a calculating look.

“The reason I know so much about Mecha-Man,” she told him, “is–” Her words caught in her throat. This was it, wasn’t it? There was no way around it – either she trusted him or she didn’t; either he would accept her and she’d have someone on her side or she was on her own again. She sighed in defeat, her shoulders sagging though the armor didn’t move. “I know _about_ him because I know _him_. I could disarm the bombs because the man who _wired_ the bombs taught _me_ to wire a circuit. The same man who made the Mecha-Man suit is the same man who made me.”

The Hound’s head cocked to one side, one ear standing up. “Wait… are you saying you’re…” He stared at her head in bewilderment and allowed his eyes to wander down her suit.

She arched an eyebrow at him. “What did I say last time?”

The Hound’s eyes shot back up to her face and he paled. “No–I mean… _does_ it come off??? I mean, when you say he ‘made’ you…”

She gave him a deadpan look. “Not like that, genius. I thought you were supposed to be _smart_ ,” she replied, rubbing her temples with one gauntleted hand. “Look,” she continued, “when a man loves a woman very much–”

His jaw dropped. “Wait, Mecha-Man’s your _father_!?!” he interrupted, eyes widening and jaw hanging open, staring into her face in shock.

She groaned and averted her eyes to study the monogrammed handkerchief in her gauntleted hand. She should have known: of course he would judge her for her father’s actions; she would, too, after today. “You see? _This_ is why I didn’t want to tell you!”

“No, it’s not that,” he assured her quickly, putting up his hands in a placating gesture and placing one on her shoulder, drawing her attention back to him. She was surprised to see concern in his face. “It’s just… oh, bloody hell, you and my cousin could start a support group…”

She furrowed her brows for a moment but shrugged, filing that information away for later. “I didn’t know at first,” she insisted, eyes wide, pleading for him to believe her. “I knew he’d taken a new job, one that paid better than his old one, but I thought it was just more of the same. But then I heard him talking to someone on the phone in the middle of the night and followed him to a meeting.” She sighed in defeat. “He was picking up a shipment of alien tech. The next day I followed him to his workshop. He was building a suit, and from the look of the people he was with, their hardware, all of it, I just _knew_ he had to be working for criminals. And when Mecha-Man showed up just a couple weeks later? It didn’t take a genius to figure out where he came from: my father built that suit, even if _he_ wasn’t the one inside. That’s when I decided I wanted nothing more to do with him. That’s when I decided to come to London for college.” Her lower lip quivered and she hated it. The words just kept spilling out. “But he’s still my father. I hate what he’s doing and who he’s doing it for, but I can’t bring myself to really hate _him_ for it. Everything I am, everything I have, it all came from him. _He_ taught me almost everything I know… and I _know_ he still loves me.”

“So that’s where your tech came from? Why so much of it is so like Mecha-Man’s suit?” There wasn’t any judgment in his voice.

She nodded, still staring down at her gauntlets. Her hands trembled with the strain. And yet, there was a level of relief in finally telling someone. “I grabbed what I could from his lab before I left Paris, came here, and started working on my own suit. Aside from a couple days ago, I haven’t talked to him since. My father’s designs have hurt so many people – first back home and now here – and I thought maybe I could derive some good from them. I _need_ to stop him – now more than ever. After all, the reason he came to London was because he was following _me_. Because he wanted to reconcile with _me_.” She clenched her hands. “And I _want_ that – I want it _so badly_ … but I just can’t do it, not when he’s responsible for so much. Does it make me a bad person that I still love him when he tried to blow up London twenty minutes ago?”

The Hound took her hand and squeezed, placing his other hand on her shoulder. “I get it,” he assured her, a soothing tone in his voice. “Believe me, I understand what you’re going through. Maybe not my _father_ – _he_ was a good man – but when I found out my uncle… well… I understand feeling ashamed of what your family has done. And I can understand wanting to love someone who has done terrible things just because he’s your father – my cousin still loved his father despite everything, and _his_ father was far worse than yours; _yours_ sounds like he genuinely cares about people – or at least about you. That your _father_ works for bad people doesn’t make _you_ a bad person. He is not you.” He fell silent for a moment. “I don’t exactly know you that well, but I can already tell that you are better than him. _You_ are a hero. And with your information, the Heroes of Paris could stop your father _and_ his employer in their tracks.”

“Maybe…” She looked into his face and was surprised to see concern instead of the arrogance she’d been expecting. She shook her head. “But not right now. I’m not ready for anyone else to know yet.”

He nodded. “I understand. But when you’re ready, we’ll do it together… partner.” He held out his hand.

She smiled sadly, fighting back the tears that sprang unbidden to her eyes, and took his hand, nodding. “Thanks… partner.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That’s the last word for “The Hound and the Maiden,” but not for the Hound and Maiden themselves! I already have a sequel in the works, as well as a couple “Life and Times” one-shots featuring them which will come out in the meantime. Tomorrow will be a different “Life and Times” one-shot, followed by a few more chapters of “The Woman out of the Fridge.” The next multi-chapter story will be “A Bees’ Life.”


End file.
